Cafe Hunter -
An Exploration of Korea's Coffee-Loving Culture
For about three years, I was an avid cafe hunter in Seoul.
I tirelessly sought out cafe after cafe every chance I had, towing a photographer friend along or bringing my own clunky camera to capture some snaps of the interior. My money was spent on frothy lattes with elaborate foam art, green teas, delicate desserts with a French air but distinctly Korean attitude…
My hunting took me to traditional 다방-style tea houses, concrete cafes set up inside old print shops from the 70s, dusty, single rooms lit with neon tubes and decorated with punk posters and vinyls long unplayed. I witnessed bubble-gum pink cute cafes transform into industrial-chic, strip down into modern neutral, spring back with kitschy fervor and around again to the feminine classic. Korea’s cafe culture is committed to trendiness like nothing else and changes with lightning-quick speed to be NUMBER ONE.
Endless hours have been spent within cafes all over Seoul. They are literal houses of memories for me. In Seoul, our tiny living quarters are not used for much besides sleeping and watching dramas late at night - we meet our friends, have business meetings, study, work, read, date, escape our families, brainstorm, dream, nap, breakup… all in cafes. We examine every naver post and instagram #(location)카페추천 to find a cafe that is just right.
My old blog was called The “Cafe Hunter.”
I posted photos of cafes all over Seoul, eventually writing my own thoughts to go with each spot. Now, many of those cafes are closed and gone. This is the hazard of cafe-blogging in Korea - nowhere lasts long, no matter how beloved and beautiful it is, and writing the cafe address and hours becomes quickly meaningless. It’s not much fun going through and editing posts barely a few months old to inform your readers that this cafe no longer exists.
But looking at those photos again, I realize they are time capsules of special places. Here I had this argument with the Ex-Boyfriend. Here I took a moment before heading into the office late at night. Here I fought with my mom over the phone. Here I met someone who told me being mixed Korean is just so exhausting in Korea and why, why, why won’t her family accept her?
For each collection of photos, I wrote something - sometimes just a brief caption, sometimes an entire essay. It depended on my mood, I suppose. My Cafe Hunter blogs and photos were printed in a local Korean magazine a number of times. I would like to be prouder of this fact, but if you knew the full story… I’ll share it sometime.
Anyway.
It would be regrettable to allow all of those beautiful photos and journal entries (because that’s really what they were; not blogs about cafes, but in truth just what I was thinking at that moment of time) to go to waste, unseen and gone. Like so many of the cafes that I wrote about.
My ever-changing, ever-evolving, ever-self-destructing and ever-rebuilding Seoul.
These Cafe Hunter archives are for you.
Keep checking the Creative Writing section of the website to see my occasional Cafe Hunter posts.