Koreans cut pork belly with kitchen scissors for two reasons, not one. The practical one: thick, fatty slices curl on a hot grill, and scissors snip them mid-sizzle without dragging meat to a cutting board. The historical one: the habit didn’t start with meat — it started with noodles.
The Scissors Aren’t About the Meat — They’re About the Noodles
Table-side gawi (가위, scissors) show up in nearly every Korean restaurant now — grilled meat, live octopus, kimchi-jjigae with sausage chunks, all get the same treatment. But the habit traces back to a narrower origin: naengmyeon (냉면, cold buckwheat noodles) shops in the 1970s, where servers used kitchen scissors to cut the long, springy noodle strands that customers couldn’t easily bite through with chopsticks alone. Once scissors became a normal fixture on Korean tables — sitting in a cup next to the chopsticks, not tucked away in a kitchen drawer — cooks and diners started reaching for them on anything that resisted a knife at a crowded table: pork belly, galbi ribs, tteok in stew, whole squid.
There’s a system logic to it that I appreciate more than I probably should for someone whose day job is maintaining internal systems at a Korean financial company. A knife needs a cutting board, which needs table space, which a six-person grill table doesn’t have. A knife also means lifting the meat off the heat to slice it properly, so it keeps cooking off the flame and cools before you can eat it. Scissors do the job on the grill itself, in about two seconds, without anyone standing up. It’s not elegant. It’s efficient — and once you’ve eaten enough samgyeopsal (삼겹살, literally “three-layer[ed] [meat],” referring to pork belly’s alternating fat-and-meat bands) dinners, you stop noticing the tool and just miss it when a restaurant hands you a knife instead.
Samgyeopsal Is Newer Than You’d Think
Here’s the part that surprised me when I first looked into it: samgyeopsal isn’t some centuries-old national dish. The first mention in a major newspaper — the Dong-A Ilbo — dates to 1934, and it didn’t become the default order at a Korean BBQ table until the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Before that, beef was the meat Koreans actually wanted. Pork got pushed by national food policy instead, as a cattle-sparing alternative at a time when cattle were valuable for farm labor and beef supply was tight — pork was the practical substitute, not the aspirational choice.
Pork belly’s specific cut also has a cheaper, more structural backstory. For much of the mid-20th century, Korea exported leaner, premium cuts abroad and kept the fattier belly for the domestic market, which is part of why it stayed the affordable option while other cuts didn’t. An industrial-era folk belief helped seal the deal: fatty pork was said to “clean dust from the lungs,” a claim with no real medical backing that nonetheless still gets repeated today — I’ve heard coworkers half-joke about it on bad fine-dust days, reaching for samgyeopsal like a lung detox. Whatever the reasoning, the shift stuck. Survey after survey since has put pork belly at the top of Koreans’ most-preferred pork cuts — a consistent verdict for a dish that had only been mainstream for about two decades at that point.
March 3rd: The Marketing Campaign That Became a National Holiday
March 3rd — written 3/3 — functions as an unofficial “Samgyeopsal Day” in Korea now, and it’s worth being direct about where that came from: it’s a marketing campaign, not a folk tradition. In 2003, the Paju-Yeoncheon Livestock Cooperative launched it to move a surplus of pork, building the date around a pun that a lot of Koreans still repeat without thinking about it — “sam” (삼) means “three,” it’s the first syllable of “samgyeopsal” (three-layered meat), and 3/3 gave the date two matching threes. It’s the same basic playbook as Pepero Day on November 11 (the “11/11” sticks look like the snack) — a shape-and-number pun a company or industry group turns into an annual sales spike.
What makes it interesting isn’t the pun — puns like that get proposed constantly and mostly go nowhere. What stuck was that restaurants, then grocery chains, then media coverage all picked it up as an easy annual hook, and two decades later it’s reached the point where a lot of people I work with treat March 3rd as a legitimate reason to plan a hoesik (회식, a work dinner that leans more mandatory than social) around pork belly, without knowing — or caring — that the whole thing started as a livestock cooperative’s plan to clear inventory. That’s honestly the part I find most useful to know: a huge share of what feels like “traditional” Korean food culture is closer to twenty years old than two hundred.
What You Actually Pay Per Person
Prices vary by neighborhood and how hungry your table is, but the range is consistent enough to put numbers on it. A bare-bones dinner at a no-frills neighborhood grill — a couple of 150g servings of pork belly, lettuce, garlic, kimchi, no extras — runs somewhere between ₩15,000 and ₩35,000 per person before anyone orders a drink. Add what an actual dinner usually includes — extra servings once the first round disappears, rice, a shared doenjang-jjigae (된장찌개, fermented soybean-paste stew) at the end, banchan refills — and a realistic total lands closer to ₩35,000-50,000 per person.
| Scenario | What’s typically included | Per-person price |
|---|---|---|
| Bare-bones neighborhood grill | 1-2 servings pork belly (150g), lettuce, garlic, kimchi | ₩15,000-35,000 |
| Realistic full meal | Extra servings, rice, doenjang-jjigae, banchan refills | ₩35,000-50,000 |
| Standard hanwoo (Korean beef) BBQ | Native beef cuts, table service | ₩40,000-80,000 |
| Premium hanwoo / tasting course | Graded cuts, curated course | ₩150,000-350,000+ |
I did the math on our last team hoesik at our usual spot near the office: six of us, eight rounds of pork belly, two bowls of doenjang-jjigae, rice all around, and enough soju that nobody was counting bottles by the end. The bill came to ₩312,000. Split six ways, that’s ₩52,000 each — a bit above the “realistic full meal” range above, which tracks, since that range doesn’t really account for a full night of soju. Compare that to the one hanwoo dinner our team did for a manager’s farewell last year, which ran closer to ₩70,000 a head for standard cuts with noticeably less food on the table. Pork belly isn’t just culturally dominant — cut for cut, it’s still doing the most for the least.
How We Actually Eat It — Ssam, Second Cuts, and My Table
The actual eating part is simple enough that I won’t turn it into a checklist: a piece of grilled pork belly, a smear of ssamjang (쌈장, a fermented soybean-and-chili dipping paste), maybe a sliver of raw garlic or green chili, wrapped in a lettuce or perilla leaf into one bite — a ssam (쌈, literally “a wrapped thing”). The scissors matter here too, in a smaller way: cutting the meat into bite-sized pieces before it hits the wrap means you’re not trying to fold a slab of pork belly around lettuce with your hands, which nobody actually does well.
At home, it plays out differently than at hoesik. My wife and kid are firmly on team cold noodles — I’ve written before about how our household splits over kongguksu and naengmyeon versus hot soup — but samgyeopsal is the one hot dish that gets a pass from both of them, mostly because it ends with naengmyeon anyway: the fat from the grill gets cut with a bowl of cold noodles at the very end, a genuinely common combination at Korean BBQ restaurants, not just our table. My daughter’s contribution is entirely about the scissors — she’s decided cutting the meat is her job now, badly, and none of us have the heart to take them back from her.
Quick Answers
Why do Koreans cut meat with scissors instead of a knife?
Because it’s faster and cleaner at a hot table — no cutting board needed, no lifting meat off the grill — and because scissors were already a normal Korean restaurant tool by the time samgyeopsal became popular. The habit started in 1970s naengmyeon shops, where scissors cut long noodles, then spread to meat, seafood, and stews.
What is Samgyeopsal Day and when is it?
It’s March 3rd (3/3), an unofficial pork belly holiday that started in 2003 as a marketing campaign by the Paju-Yeoncheon Livestock Cooperative, built on a pun matching “sam” (three) to “samgyeopsal” (three-layered meat) and the date’s two threes.
How much does samgyeopsal actually cost in Korea?
A no-frills solo dinner runs about ₩15,000-35,000 per person; a realistic full meal with rice, stew, and extra servings lands around ₩35,000-50,000. A group hoesik with drinks can run higher — ours came to ₩52,000 a head.
Is pork belly Korea’s traditional BBQ meat?
Not historically. Beef was the preferred meat for most of Korea’s modern history; samgyeopsal only became the default from the late 1980s onward, and surveys since have consistently ranked it as Koreans’ favorite pork cut.
None of this makes the scissors or the 3/3 marketing any less real as culture now — twenty-some years is plenty of time for a promotional gimmick to turn into something people genuinely look forward to, and I’ve become one of them. But if you’re visiting and want the version locals actually eat instead of a tourist-priced one, skip the printed English-menu places near hotels and look for a neighborhood grill with a handwritten price list and a cup of well-worn scissors already sitting on the table — that’s usually the ₩35,000-per-person spot, not the ₩70,000 one.