On 2 July 2026, Hyundai Department Store announced the first overhaul of its city outlet in Dongdaemun in the ten years since it opened. Four floors from basement two to level two, about 14,800 sqm. Of that, the 4,595 sqm on basement two opening first in September is the food hall, and the concept is a market alley. On a site where Gwangjang Market is ten minutes on foot and Dongdaemun Market is just across the road, the outlet decided to build one more alley underground.
1.The address first. 20 Jangchungdan-ro 13-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul, in Euljiro 6-ga. Six basement levels and nine floors above ground with 37,663 sqm of trading area, the building was Geopyeong Freya, then Keresta, and opened as Hyundai City Outlet on 11 March 2016. The company set a first-year target of KRW 160 billion at opening. The 14,800 sqm being reworked is 39 percent of the trading area, and some 60 new brands arrive in stages by the end of the year.
2.Some 30 food and beverage brands go into the basement two food hall. Among the known Korean names are Doseulbak from Apgujeong and Mijin from Gwanghwamun, joined by the coffee roaster TERAROSA, which started in Gangneung, the Mexican grill Cuchara and a Japanese bakery. Basement one becomes a K-fashion hall in August, taking in some ten Korean brands, and level two gets a beauty concept store and a pharmacy-style health and beauty shop. A global service lounge handling tax refunds and currency exchange in one place will expand on basement one by the end of the year, the company says.
3.Start with why the floors were set that way. There are three reasons to put food deep underground. Loading and waste routes connect straight to the basement car park, oily exhaust does not have to be dragged up through the upper floors, and smells do not leak into the selling floors. The market alley concept is closer to a costume put over that constraint. Build low counters like stalls and bend the aisles to cut sightlines short, and 1,390 pyeong stops reading at a glance, so people walk further.
4.What a real alley sells is smell. Oil hissing and smoke leaking out past the stall catches the feet of passers-by, while an indoor food hall has to contain that smell. Run the extraction hard and the smell that would catch people disappears; run it soft and it climbs to the floors selling clothes. Half of imitating an alley on basement two is a services fight over the space between those two settings.
5.Even the published menu splits by temperature. Cold buckwheat noodles come in chilled broth and beads of water gather on the outside of the bowl, while a stone pot sends steam up into your face when the lid comes off. One is food you tip back and stand up from, the other is food you sit with and scrape the crust from, so they use a seat for different lengths of time. Mixing thirty outlets into one hall means loading foods with different dwell times onto the same seats, and that is where the turnover arithmetic starts to slip.
6.The first point is one number. Break down visitor spending at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in the Seoul Design Foundation survey and food and drink came to 37.4 percent against 15.3 percent for fashion. Anyone who came all the way to Dongdaemun spends more than twice as much on food as on clothes. The entire case for a building put up to sell clothes filling its basement with food sits in that one gap.
7.Second. To the question of why build underground when there are real alleys within walking distance, the answer is thresholds. Stalls have no English menus, some still take no cards, the toilets are far and there is no air conditioning in summer. Anyone dragging a suitcase has nowhere obvious to sit. Basement two is an alley with all those thresholds removed, and the price of removing them is losing the smell and the haggling.
8.The third point came out of a failure. This company closed its Dongdaemun downtown duty free store in July 2025, five years after opening. Chinese group tours and daigou buyers thinned out, the exchange rate rose and the rent weighed. A product built for the days when groups arrived by coach and bought in bulk. Today's customers come individually, and an individual traveller's day starts with food and ends with food. From January to May this year, foreign sales at this outlet rose 122 percent year on year to 23.7 percent of the total, three times the 2019 share.
9.Now the money. 4,595 sqm is 1,390 pyeong, and split across thirty outlets that gives 46 pyeong each on paper, but take out the seating, aisles and shared services and each outlet's own area drops to somewhere between 10 and 15 pyeong (estimates from here). Put the average spend between KRW 11,000 for cold noodles and KRW 17,000 for a set meal at KRW 15,000. Take 300 seats, eleven trading hours and eight turns and 2,400 people sit down a day for daily revenue of KRW 36 million, which over 350 days gives KRW 12.6 billion.
10.The outlet-level accounts are tight. Commission on a leased food court unit in a department store usually runs between 22 and 28 percent of revenue, with ingredients around 30 percent. On KRW 35 million of monthly revenue that is KRW 8.75 million of commission, KRW 10.5 million of ingredients and KRW 7 million of labour at 20 percent. Take consumables, card fees and depreciation out of the remaining KRW 8.75 million and what stays in hand drops into the low teens as a percentage of revenue. Brands with queues at their own shops accept these terms for exposure, not for margin.
11.Read the outlet's own arithmetic the other way. KRW 12.6 billion of food hall revenue at 25 percent commission gives KRW 3.1 billion recovered, KRW 2.27 million per pyeong a year, while the clothing floors have positions where the commission rate alone passes 30 percent and pull more from the same area. Widening food and beverage is not a decision to earn more on that floor. It is closer to paying to hold people inside the building for an hour over a meal and send them upstairs.
12.The risk sits in the seats. A rail holds dozens of garments, while a meal has one person occupying one place, and that place is not selling area. The more the market alley concept bends the aisles and stands up stalls, the fewer seats there are. Is it over once turnover hits the target. Even a hall with 2,400 people passing through fills up for two hours from noon and two hours from six in the evening, and for the other seven hours more than half the seats sit empty.
13.Trace the line and the source is Japan's depachika. The idea of filling a department store basement with food to push customers from below upward, grammar Korean department stores have followed for a long time. Recent years went toward scale. One department store in Gangnam expanded its food hall to nearly 6,000 pyeong and kept only the restaurant zone inside it open until 10pm, breaking the store's own closing time. The era of the basement as bait ended and the basement became the destination, and that is the change of the past few years.
14.What actually differs is the competitor. This food hall's rival is not Gwangjang Market but Doota Mall across the road, and what those two buildings sell is neither clothes nor food but dwell time. The problem is that dwell time does not convert to revenue by itself. 8.23 million foreign visitors to Seoul in the first half spent KRW 5.6172 trillion on cards, about KRW 680,000 each, and which floor that money lands on is decided by the counters upstairs rather than by the restaurants. Even if the basement gathers people, with nothing to sell upstairs the food hall is just thirty restaurants.
15.A city outlet has opened up its own body for the first time in ten years to turn 4,595 sqm on basement two into a market-alley food hall in September, and the case rests on one line of survey data, that visitors to this area spend 37.4 percent on food and drink against 15.3 percent on fashion. Put this structure in Korea and the services catch first. Mixing several trades into one hall splits the licensing between refreshment and general restaurant categories outlet by outlet, and the moment frying and grilling go in, grease ducts and supply and extract capacity start eating the floor-to-floor height. Fail to work that into the numbers from the start on basement two, and a drawing that set out to build an alley loses its seats first while dodging the ductwork.