How we rate — the KFG Score
Every menu has that one moment: you are staring at a Korean dish you have never heard of, and you have no idea whether you will love it or regret it. The KFG Score is our answer. It is our own rating system — not copied from anywhere — that scores each of our 56+ dishes on the things that actually decide whether you should order it. We built it because no one else scores Korean food from the perspective of someone deciding what to eat for the first time.
Spice
0–5How hot it really is for a general international palate — not for someone raised on chili. We would rather warn you than surprise you. 0 is not spicy at all; 5 is genuinely challenging.
Beginner-easy
1–5How safely you can order this on your very first Korean meal. A 5 is a crowd-pleaser almost anyone enjoys; a 1 is a dish we would save until you have found your feet.
Adventure
1–5How far it sits from Western comfort food — think fermentation, unusual textures, or offal. A 1 tastes familiar on the first bite; a 5 is for the genuinely curious eater who wants the real thing.
Veg-friendly
1–5How easily you can eat it vegetarian, in the real world of Korean restaurants (where fish sauce and meat hide in a lot of places). A 5 is naturally veg; a 1 almost always contains meat or seafood.
Social style
Solo · Shared · EitherWhether the dish is a personal bowl or something meant to be shared from the middle of the table. It changes how — and with how many people — you should order it.
Price
$ · $$ · $$$The rough price bracket at a typical Korean restaurant: $ is street-food cheap, $$ is a casual sit-down meal, and $$$ is a treat-yourself occasion.
How we assign the scores
The scores are editorial judgments, made consistently across every dish by people who grew up eating this food in Korea — not scraped numbers and not AI guesses. We look at the actual ingredients, how the dish is normally served, how it is commonly adjusted for milder or Western tastes, and how a first-time eater tends to react to it. Then we score it on the same six axes as everything else, so the numbers mean the same thing from one dish to the next.
They are a starting point, not a verdict. Taste is personal, recipes vary by cook and region, and a dish that is a 4 for spice at one restaurant might be a 2 at another. Use the KFG Score to shortlist what to try — then read the bottom line and the full guide on each dish for the honest detail. And if you have a food allergy, always confirm the exact ingredients with the restaurant before you eat.
Why we built our own system
Most Korean-food pages online just describe a dish. That is useful, but it does not help you choosebetween ten unfamiliar names on a menu. By scoring every dish the same way, we let you compare them at a glance and filter for what fits you — mild and beginner-friendly, or adventurous and shared, or genuinely vegetarian. It is the guide we wish we had handed every friend who has ever asked us “so what should I actually order?”
Have a suggestion for how we score, or think we got a dish wrong? Tell us — we update these as we learn.