Someone hands you a shot glass. Both hands. You're not sure if you should bow, hold your breath, or just drink it. Somewhere down the table, your manager raises his glass, says something you half-catch, and everyone drinks at once — except you, who's still holding your glass wondering what just happened.
That's hoesik. If you're working in Korea, even briefly, you'll run into it. And if you're just visiting and happen to get invited along by Korean friends or coworkers of a friend, understanding what's actually going on will save you from a very confused evening.
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| Cheers to another hoesik |
What Hoesik Actually Is
Hoesik (회식) literally just means "eating together," but in practice it refers to a company or team gathering that happens after work hours — usually dinner, usually with alcohol, sometimes stretching into a second or third stop. It's not a party in the Western sense. It's closer to a mandatory-but-not-officially-mandatory team bonding ritual, where rank and hierarchy are very much still in the room, just with soju instead of spreadsheets.
The traditional structure has a name for each stage: 1차 (il-cha, "first round," usually dinner), 2차 (i-cha, "second round," often a bar or another drinking spot), and sometimes 3차 (sam-cha, "third round," which used to mean noraebang, or karaoke). Whether a hoesik goes to 2차 or 3차 depends entirely on the crowd, the era, and honestly, how tired everyone is.
1차 (dinner) → 2차 (bar/drinks) → 3차 (karaoke) — the traditional full sequence, though most modern hoesik stop at 1차.
The company or the highest-ranking person present usually pays.
Attendance is technically optional, but in older-style workplaces, "optional" often didn't feel very optional.
Hoesik as "The Extension of Work" — My Generation's Experience
I can only really tell you what hoesik looked like when I was in my 20s and 30s, working through the late 90s and early 2000s, because that's the version I actually lived. Back then, the phrase you'd hear constantly was "회식도 업무의 연장이다" — hoesik is an extension of work. It wasn't really framed as a night off. It was framed as something you showed up to because your team showed up to it, and your manager was watching who did and didn't.
The menu wasn't really up for discussion either. If your boss liked pork belly and soju, that's what the team ate, every time. I remember wondering, more than once, why we couldn't just go to a nice restaurant instead of the same grilled pork belly place with the same plastic stools. But that wasn't really how it worked — the higher-ranking person picked the place, and everyone else went along with it.
And depending on who your boss was, the seating arrangement could get uncomfortable in a specific way. Some managers had an unspoken expectation that a female employee would sit next to them, or that a drink somehow "tasted better" when a woman poured it. I want to be fair here — not every boss was like that. Some of the more decent, self-aware managers would eat with the team for a bit and then quietly leave early, letting everyone else relax without them. But whether it was one type of boss or the other, sitting through a hoesik with your direct superior present was never really a comfortable evening. That part, I think, hasn't changed much even now — a hoesik with your boss at the table is just a different kind of evening than one without.
The Unspoken Rules: Korean Drinking Etiquette
If there's one thing that trips up foreign visitors at a Korean table more than anything else, it's not the food — it's the drinking etiquette, formally called judo (주도), literally "the way of alcohol." This isn't really about hoesik specifically; it's a broader set of manners for drinking with anyone older than you, but it shows up most intensely at company dinners because that's where age and rank collide most visibly.
The core rules are fairly consistent no matter who you ask: you never pour your own drink — you wait for someone else to fill your glass, and you keep an eye on the glasses around you, especially your elders', so you can refill them before they're empty. When you pour for someone older, you use two hands — one on the bottle, one supporting your forearm or the bottle itself. When you receive a drink from someone older, you hold your glass with both hands too. And when you actually drink in front of an elder or a senior colleague, the custom is to turn your head slightly away and, ideally, take the sip out of their direct line of sight — the idea being that showing your mouth or the act of swallowing directly in front of someone respected is considered a little too casual, even a little rude.
There's also a sequencing rule: nobody drinks until the most senior person at the table has raised their glass first. You wait for the toast — usually "건배" (geonbae) or the slightly warmer "위하여" (wihayeo) — before anyone touches their drink.
This is something Korean kids are, ideally, supposed to learn from their own parents before they start drinking socially as adults — not because it's some strict legal rule, but because if nobody ever teaches you, you find out the hard way, usually by getting quietly scolded by an older coworker at your very first company dinner.
You don't have to learn it from a parent specifically. But learning it from somewhere before you need it is a lot less painful than learning it in the moment, in front of your new boss.
None of this is written down anywhere official. Nobody hands you a manual. It's just absorbed, generation after generation, at family tables long before it ever shows up at a work one.
Soju, Beer, and Where "Somaek" Actually Came From
If you spend any time at a Korean table, you'll hear the word somaek (소맥) — soju mixed with beer, usually in a ratio somewhere between 3:7 and 5:5 depending on who's mixing it. It's become so standard at hoesik tables that a lot of younger drinkers assume it's always been this way. It hasn't.
The mixed-drink habit itself, known more broadly as pokdanju (폭탄주, literally "bomb liquor"), traces back to the 1980s in Korea, and — somewhat fittingly — its roots aren't in casual drinking culture at all. It's generally traced to legal, military, and political circles, where whiskey mixed with beer was used as a fast, cheap way to get a large group drunk in a hierarchical, high-pressure setting. The specific word "somaek" has an even stranger origin story: it's said to trace back to 1980, when journalists laid off during a government-led media consolidation joked bitterly that if the press could be "consolidated," soju and beer could be too — calling their mixed drink "tongpyehapju," or "consolidation liquor." The term "somaek" itself didn't really catch on until the 2000s, when it rode the popularity of a ginseng liquor called Baekseju, which drinkers were mixing with soju in various ratios before the soju-and-beer version eventually became the default.
I'll be honest about my own take on this one: I've never liked pokdanju. Mixing drinks makes me lose track completely — I black out, and that's just not a fun way to spend an evening. As far as I remember, this whole mixed-drink habit started becoming common sometime around when I was in my 20s, and it's stuck around ever since, just under different names and ratios.
How Hoesik Has Changed — And Why Everyone's Arguing About It
After I stepped away from work for a while and later joined a company where almost everyone on the team was a mother returning to work like me, hoesik looked completely different from what I remembered. Nobody pushed for a second round. People had one, maybe two drinks and called it a night. Some companies I've heard of don't even bother with an evening hoesik anymore — they just do it over lunch instead, since younger employees increasingly value their personal time after clocking out.
That lines up with what the actual data shows. A 2023 survey by market research firm Embrain found that 52.9% of Korean office workers were satisfied with their company's hoesik culture — up from 45.9% the year before. The top reasons cited were "not being pressured to drink" (46.7%) and "the event ending relatively early" (40.6%). But the same survey found that 48.6% of workers still see hoesik as, essentially, an extension of work — so the discomfort hasn't disappeared, it's just gotten shorter and less alcohol-heavy.
A separate survey by HR platform Incruit found that roughly 9 in 10 workers were happy with the shift toward one-round, shorter hoesik — but the generational split inside that number is telling: workers in their 50s and up still largely preferred a traditional evening hoesik with drinking (68.7%), while MZ-generation workers leaned toward alcohol-free lunch hoesik instead.
And this is where I have to admit I genuinely don't know much about the current version, because it's simply not something I encounter day to day anymore — I had to look this part up rather than speak from experience. What I found actually surprised me a little. A 2023 survey of Gen Z job seekers by recruiting platform Catch found that only 29% actually disliked hoesik outright, while 27% said they liked it and 44% were neutral. What Gen Z wanted wasn't no hoesik — it was a different kind: a short, one-hour lunch or dinner gathering topped the list at 33%, followed by an omakase or wine bar outing at 30%, with voluntary attendance and alcohol-free formats each pulling around 21%. So the popular narrative that "young people just hate hoesik" isn't quite accurate — it's more that they want it shorter, optional, and not built entirely around how fast the group can get drunk together.
That shift is showing up in where people actually eat, too. The old default of grilled pork belly and soju — the kind of place I've written about in my Korean BBQ guide — is increasingly sharing space with family restaurants and other non-drinking-centric venues, partly because they work equally well for people who drink and people who don't, without anyone feeling out of place.
A Foreigner's Guide: What To Do If You're Invited
If you're working in Korea, or even just traveling and get pulled into a hoesik by Korean friends, a genuine invitation is worth taking seriously — being invited to someone's after-work dinner is generally considered a real gesture of goodwill, not a formality.
A few things worth knowing going in: don't pour your own drink, and don't be alarmed if someone keeps refilling your glass before it's empty — that's attentiveness, not pressure. Wait for the most senior person to lift their glass before you drink. If you don't want to drink at all, that's genuinely fine to say — health reasons or simply not drinking are accepted, especially from a foreign guest, and nobody expects you to know the full etiquette anyway. You'll get a little extra credit if you do the two-handed pour or the head-turn, but nobody will hold it against you if you don't.
If you're actually working at a Korean company, here's the honest advice I'd give you: companies today rarely force hoesik the way they used to, but plenty still quietly hope you'll show up. So go to your first one, no matter what. It's the easiest way to get a read on what your specific workplace's hoesik culture actually feels like, since it genuinely varies a lot from company to company.
Outside of the occasional official hoesik, there's also a more casual version that happens on its own — coworkers grabbing dinner and a drink together before heading home, with no formal planning involved. This tends to happen a lot more when you're single. Once you're married, especially with kids at home, that kind of spontaneous after-work dinner mostly disappears — home takes priority, and everyone understands that without needing an explanation.
More than anything, hoesik is less about the alcohol itself and more about what it represents — a shared meal, a small ritual of respect, a way of saying "we're on the same team" without having to say it directly. Whether that happens over soju at a pork belly restaurant or over a quiet one-hour lunch these days, the underlying idea hasn't really changed, even if the format keeps shifting with every generation that sits down at the table.