Latte Stage Capitalism

Courtesy of Kat Carabio

To talk about the café economy in Seoul is to talk about an architecture of disappointment. A noisy and rumbunctious ever-moving organism of tents, ajumma, toasts, street hawkers, and fake goods has been usurped by air-conditioned coffee shops, all playing the same music, offering the same drinks, and providing the same service. (Admittedly, however, only one of them has recently been forced to issue a groveling apology for not knowing anything about Korean history or, perhaps, knowing too much about Korean history).

Latte is horse

Korean people are often traditionally associated with tea. My friend Brother Anthony has written books on the subject and proudly offers anyone who visits his office to drink from a wonderfully small cup as he creates concoctions of herbal goodness.

And we’re not talking the British kind of “white with two sugars please, darling.” Korean tea is a rainbow of flavors. The southern regions of Boseong and Jeju produce the famous green tea. Yuja tea is made with citron and honey and always given to those with a cold. Boricha (barley tea) is a daily herbal remedy loved by old people and young women on diets. Perhaps the most unique is the ssanghwa-cha — this is still served in some dabang around Seoul and comes complete with a raw egg yolk cracked direct into the top, moving amongst the pine nuts and jujubes to create something you will likely never forget. It’s a mix between medicine and drugs. You feel ironic drinking it in 2026 and unsure whether it’s really good for you or naughty in some way.

When I first arrived in 2005, coffee simply wasn’t a thing here. The office I worked in had a pot of coffee available for anyone to drink but to call it coffee is like calling K-pop high culture. Yes, it looked like coffee but it certainly didn’t smell like it nor taste like it. It was watery brown and had more hazelnut than was morally decent. The only other option was a stick of powdered milk and sugar that you emptied into a cup and filled with hot water. During 12-hour shifts, my friends and I slowly realized that two of these mashed together was as close to a cup as we were gonna get. Folktales abound of people eating the sachets raw when devilishly tired.

However, coffee wasn’t really as visible. Dabang were about and existed on both a promiscuous and a completely innocent level. But where today stand a veritable infinite loop of franchise and independent bean makers was once something else completely. The expansion in the number of coffee shops is one of the more reliable stats here because it's verifiable with your eyes. This is the strange caffeinated mitosis of the Korean urban landscape

Performative caffeination

It can actually be quite a fun game while you’re in any part of Korea to stop, look around you, and count the coffee shops visible at any moment. You can do the same with churches as well. But the sad thing is what happens when you imagine what all these cafes used to be 20 years ago.

Of course, some cafes look nice. They are a space where you can relax. Bring a book. Meet friends. Go on a date. Or even just escape from the humidity, rain, snow, or yellow dust (depending on the season). For the most part, unlike the pub, you can even take your kids there. Be warned though, “No Kids Zone” is actually a thing in Korea, as disgusting as that sounds. But if you only look at the coffee shops, you’re missing the true monopoly on our culture this brown-ness has had. Coffee is also sold everywhere, from Mom’s Touch to Paris Baguette. If you go anywhere in this country and coffee is not available, protest to the government and take crowds into Gwanghwamun to rectify it immediately.

Just how prevalent coffee is here becomes more obvious when you go elsewhere. Yes, they drink coffee in China, Japan and Singapore, but nothing like they do here in Korea. My Singaporean students come to class with huge tumblers filled with water which they refill throughout the day. Some eventually succumb and start riding the dark horse, but others are determined not to become Koreanized during their time here.

But this isn’t just about coffee in Korea. It’s about the "Third Space" becoming the only space. When the sound-porous box many young Korean people now call home is little more than a place to store luggage and sleep while the shared Netflix account plays in the background, the cafe becomes the real place where life happens.

You pay for the privilege of being alone together, of sitting among your peers while the MacBook stares back at you. Douglas McWilliams called this the "flat white economy," which in Korean terms is a deeply awkward translation, because the flat white is a foreign body. Here it’s Ice Americanos for the most part.

What happens when you can’t afford the apartment in Gangnam, the wedding, the car, the prestige? You buy the 6,000-won einspänner. I had one yesterday.