OUR STORY
Started with a food blog. Grew into people who get things done.
ZenKimchi Concierge is small on purpose. Here’s who’s behind it and why we started booking trains and tables for strangers.
HOW THIS STARTED
A food blog started in 2004.
An American named Joe McPherson started writing about Korean food online in 2004, back when most of the internet still thought kimchi was a garnish. That blog became ZenKimchi, Korea’s first English-language food blog, and Joe is now CEO of ZenKimchi Experiences. ZenKimchi Experiences has been running tours and travel experiences in Korea since 2012, and some of them have landed on TripAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice list, the award reserved for the top one percent of experiences in the world.
ZenKimchi Concierge is the newest branch of that company. It’s built by people who’ve spent two decades watching what actually trips visitors up in Korea, and decided to just fix it instead of writing another blog post about it.
WHO RUNS THIS
Young has been the foreigner too, just in reverse.
Young is a Korean national who spent much of her adult life living and traveling around the world. She knows what it’s like to land somewhere, not read the signs, and have to guess your way through a system that was never built with you in mind. She runs ZenKimchi Concierge, and she built it around exactly that memory.
A small team works alongside her, native Korean speakers who are also fluent in English. Every request that comes through the form gets checked by an actual person on that team, not routed into some automated system and hoped for the best.
WHY WE BUILT THIS
Things that take thirty seconds at home turn into a wall here.
We kept hearing the same story from guests. Booking a train, holding a table, grabbing a ticket, simple errands anywhere else, turned into a genuine problem the moment they tried to do it in Korea. The language barrier is the obvious part, and honestly the easy part. A translation app gets you most of the way there.
The real wall is the security. Most Korean booking sites require a Korean phone number and a Korean ID just to make an account, and visitors have neither. So we became the workaround. Contact us and we book the train, hold the table, secure the ticket, or arrange the ride, the same way any international website would treat you. No local ID. No verification maze. Just a request and a confirmation.
BACKED BY ZENKIMCHI
A ZenKimchi Experiences service.
ZenKimchi Concierge runs under the same company behind Korea’s original English-language food blog and a TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice tour operation. Different service, same people who’ve been doing this for twenty years.
Let’s handle the logistics.
GET STARTED
Tell us what you need.
We’re available 10:00–19:00 KST and typically reply the same day.