Bringing Korea’s Hidden Stories to Life

Our journey started from frustration. Back in the 1990s, I studied Korean history at university, captivated by the depth of its dynasties, folklore, and culture. When I moved to Korea in 2004, I was eager to see it all come to life.

What I found instead were historic sites that had been sterilized, stripped of their soul. The guided tours I took felt like lectures on architecture rather than glimpses into the past, a palace reduced to measurements of its columns, a fortress wall reduced to a list of old district names. Accurate, technically. Nobody who gave those tours seemed to actually care about the place.

Worse, the tours treated foreign visitors like children. Rehearsed scripts, mild propaganda, food sanded down until none of Korea’s actual flavor was left. I knew Korea had more to offer than that.

So I did what I do best. I started telling Korea’s real stories myself.

From a food blog to a fixer

In 2004, I launched ZenKimchi, Korea’s first English-language food blog, to write about the food I was actually eating, not the food guidebooks assumed I should eat. The blog found an audience faster than I expected. In 2007, The New York Times ran a piece on Korean fried chicken that quoted me, and things kept snowballing from there.

Production crews started calling. I ended up consulting and appearing on Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, and John Torode’s Korean Food Tour. Media crews wanted someone who could get them past the surface, into the parts of Korea that don’t show up in a tourist brochure. That someone was me, and eventually, the small team that grew around me.

Eventually the ambition outgrew television. We wanted regular travelers to get the same access the film crews were getting.

From fixer to guide

By 2012, that work had turned into something closer to a business. I registered Zen Kimchi International in Seoul that January, and we started leading small groups through the same neighborhoods, markets, and back rooms we’d been showing to film crews. We later added our parent licensed U.S. entity, Immerse Experiences LLC, in 2023, to formalize the business on that side. We’ve been leading experiences in Korea since 2012. We’ve been a licensed company based in the U.S. since 2023.

We create experiences

Take our food outings. We skip the well-trodden streets where every stall serves the same photogenic dish, and head instead to places where the grills are already smoking and the regulars already have a seat, where the conversation runs late and nobody’s performing for a camera.

Our dark history walks get into the folklore that’s been passed down in whispers for generations, the version of the story that never made it into a textbook, not just the dates on a plaque.

And on our hikes, the trail is really just the excuse. What you’re actually there for are the shamanic sites, the old legends, the spots most travelers walk straight past without knowing they’re there.

Explaining why something exists, how it got that way, and what it tells you about how Korea actually works, that’s the job. Anyone can hand you a plate of galbi or walk you past a haunted building. We’d rather tell you why that dish means something at a Korean table, or why that building is still standing empty forty years later.

Where things stand now

As we’ve grown, we’ve added Black Label private experiences and corporate group experiences for groups that want something built specifically around them rather than a fixed itinerary. We’ve also expanded into multi-day journeys outside Seoul, because the fake French village two hours from the city was never going to be the most interesting thing in the country. Instead we go looking for the actual thing: mountain restaurants still run by the grandmother who started them, abandoned sites with real history behind the decay, landscapes nobody’s put on a postcard yet because nobody’s bothered to look.

Why ZenKimchi

A thousand years of history deserves better than column measurements, and Korean food deserves better than being watered down for a tour bus schedule. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to.

The best travel moments happen sitting shoulder to shoulder with someone who actually lives here, eating something you didn’t expect to like, hearing the story that makes the place make sense. Not in front of a placard.

If that sounds like what you’re after, you’re in the right place.

Joe McPherson
President, ZenKimchi Experiences