It's your first night in a new apartment. You've got an empty fridge, the nearest convenience store is a ten-minute walk away, and you just want a bowl of dakgalbi delivered to your door. You download Baemin — Korea's most famous food delivery app — and get to the sign-up screen. It asks for a phone number. You type in your home country's number. Nothing happens. You try again. You Google "Baemin sign up English." You find a forum post from three years ago that doesn't help. You end up walking to the convenience store.

That moment has happened to virtually every foreigner who's moved to Korea. And the reason is deceptively simple: all three major Korean food delivery apps require a Korean mobile phone number to complete SMS verification during registration. No Korean number, no account. Full stop.

Everything else in this post flows from solving that one problem first.

So why does a phone number block you completely?

It's not a bug or an oversight — it's by design. Korean internet services, especially ones tied to payments, use mobile phone verification as a form of identity confirmation. The system works beautifully if you have a Korean SIM card. If you're relying on a foreign number, even one with international roaming, the SMS simply won't arrive in the right format to pass verification.

The fix is straightforward: get a Korean SIM card. You can pick one up at Incheon Airport the moment you land (SKT, KT, and LG U+ all have booths in the arrivals hall), or at any convenience store or carrier shop in the city. Budget MVNO options like HelloMobile are cheaper than the big three and work fine for app verification. Once you have a Korean number, the whole food delivery ecosystem opens up.

If you're a short-term visitor without plans to get a local SIM, your options are genuinely limited here. The apps aren't built with tourists in mind. The Korean delivery culture is deeply tied to having a local presence — an address, a phone number, and often a local payment method. For longer-stay foreigners, though, this is a one-time hurdle.

Okay, you have a Korean number. Now which app?

The three main players are Baemin (배달의민족), Coupang Eats (쿠팡이츠), and Yogiyo (요기요). You're going to end up using at least two of them, and probably ignoring the third for months before rediscovering it.

Baemin is the dominant one. It has the most restaurants, the deepest coverage across Korea (not just Seoul), and the largest number of user reviews — which matters a lot when you can't read the menu and need to decide based on photos. Setting it up means downloading "배달의민족" from your app store, tapping 회원가입 (sign up), entering your Korean number, entering the SMS code, filling in your name (Roman letters are fine), setting a password, and accepting the terms. The interface is entirely in Korean, but if you can read Hangul at a basic level — even just phonetically — you'll get the hang of navigation faster than you expect.

For your delivery address, tap the address field and either search your address in Korean format or use 현재 위치 (current location via GPS), which usually works fine. Payment-wise, international Visa and Mastercard cards generally work, though occasionally a foreign-issued card fails on the first attempt — try re-entering it or using a different card. If you have a Korean bank account, setting up KakaoPay gives you the smoothest experience.

One thing worth knowing about Baemin: it has two delivery modes. 한집배달 is a dedicated single-household delivery — faster, but typically with a higher delivery fee. 알뜰배달 is a shared delivery route where your order gets batched with nearby orders — slower, but cheaper. If you're in no rush and want to save a few hundred won, the 알뜰 option is fine. If it's late and you're hungry, go 한집.

Coupang Eats is worth setting up alongside Baemin, especially if you already have a Coupang account. Most expats who've been in Korea more than a few months use Coupang for online shopping — it's essentially Korea's Amazon — and if you already have an account, signing into Coupang Eats is literally just entering your existing credentials. No separate registration needed.

The thing that makes Coupang Eats genuinely different is that every order is a single-household delivery. No batching, no waiting for your order to finish riding alongside a stranger's chimaek. In practice this means your food arrives faster and hotter. They also have live delivery tracking, which sounds like a minor thing until you've been burned by an estimated arrival that turned out to mean "sometime in the next 90 minutes."

The catch: restaurant selection on Coupang Eats is smaller than Baemin, particularly outside of Seoul and major cities. If you're in a smaller city or a suburban area, Baemin is almost always going to have more options. If you're in central Seoul or another major urban area, the gap matters less.

For Coupang Wow members — the paid subscription that also covers Coupang shopping — delivery on Coupang Eats is free with no minimum order. The Wow membership fee is something you'd want to check directly on Coupang's site for the current price, as it was raised in late 2024, but the value stacks nicely if you're also using it for regular Coupang deliveries.

Yogiyo is the third app, and the honest description is: it's a backup. Restaurant selection overlaps heavily with Baemin, the setup process is the same (Korean number, Korean UI, the works), and it's been losing ground to the other two for a while. That said, occasionally a restaurant appears on Yogiyo that isn't on Baemin, or prices differ in your favor due to how the platform handles commissions. Worth downloading eventually, but not the one to prioritize on day one.

The part nobody warns you about: the notes field

Once you've got the app working and you've found a restaurant, the checkout screen has a delivery notes field (배달 메모). This is where you leave instructions for the rider. If you live in an apartment building with a lobby code or a security door, leaving a note is essential — otherwise the rider might stand at the entrance not knowing what to do.

A few phrases that will genuinely save you: "문 앞에 놓아주세요" means "please leave it at my door." "문 앞에 두고 벨 눌러주세요" means "leave at door and ring the bell." If your building has a door code, add "비밀번호: XXXX" with the actual code. These are standard enough that most riders will handle them without issue.

For navigating menus you can't read, the Google Translate camera (the live scan mode) is your best friend. Point it at the screen and it overlays approximate translations on the menu items in real time. It's not perfect — Korean food names don't always translate meaningfully — but it gets you to the right category fast.

A few things that'll catch you out

Minimum order amounts exist on most restaurants and typically run somewhere in the ₩10,000 to ₩15,000 range, though some go higher. Single-item orders under the minimum simply won't process. Delivery fees vary by restaurant and distance and time of day — the "free delivery" from Baemin Club or Coupang Wow doesn't apply universally, and some restaurants charge a mandatory service fee regardless of membership status.

On foreign payment cards: some international cards fail at checkout due to 3D Secure issues or Korean payment gateway quirks. This isn't unique to food delivery — it's a general Korean e-commerce thing. Always register a backup card so you're not stuck mid-order.

If you want to track current Baemin Club pricing or Coupang Wow fees, check those directly on the apps — the numbers change, and anything written here will go stale.

The setup is more friction than it should be, honestly. Korea's food delivery culture is genuinely incredible once you're in it — the speed, the selection, the fact that you can get almost any restaurant food delivered within 30 minutes at midnight on a Tuesday — but the entry cost for foreigners is getting that first Korean phone number sorted. Do that first, everything else is manageable.