Where Did All Those ₩250,000 Omakase Crowds Disappear To?
Korea's omakase market surged explosively from 2021 through 2023 before entering a sharp and dramatic decline beginning in the second half of 2023, representing one of the most striking boom-and-bust cycles in modern Korean dining history. The Naver DataLab search index for "omakase" collapsed from a peak of 100 in January 2023 to just 15 in May 2026 — an approximately 85% drop — falling below even the pre-pandemic baseline of 20 recorded in May 2019, meaning public interest has sunk further than it stood before the omakase craze even began. According to data from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, 2,593 Japanese restaurants (including omakase establishments) closed between 2023 and May 2026, a figure that dwarfs the 1,821 Chinese restaurant and 624 café closures recorded in the same period. On the Catchtable reservation platform, Japanese omakase plummeted from the single most-booked dining category in 2023–2024 to falling entirely off the rankings by 2025. This collapse is not a simple rotation of restaurant fashions but rather a structural breakdown — performance-based consumption, where meals function as social signals, colliding with economic deceleration and the mechanics of Veblen goods, where lower prices strip away the very appeal that drove demand. The central question this article explores is whether the burst bubble creates space for an authentic Japanese culinary culture to take root in Korea, or whether the exact same cycle will simply repeat with whatever dining trend comes next.