I Tried Eating Only Convenience Store Food for a Day. The Coffee Won.

There’s a whole genre of “24 hours eating only convenience store food” videos online. I wasn’t quite ambitious enough to commit to 24 hours, so I went with 12 instead — breakfast to dinner, one GS25, no other stops. That seemed manageable. It also turned out to be enough time to figure out that the food wasn’t really the interesting part.

Breakfast: The Coffee Surprised Me

I have only tried the bottled or canned coffee at convenience stores, so I’d never actually tried this — but apparently it’s a known thing here, official enough to have its own name: 진짜우유라떼 (“real milk latte”). GS25 sells it as a set — a cup of milk, a cup of ice — and you pull the espresso shots yourself at the machine and mix it in. ₩2,900. It came out mild, a little bitter, kind of nutty, closer to a Starbucks Venti in size — and honestly better than Starbucks, at less than half the price. I’d genuinely buy this again.

Alongside it, a tuna mayo kimbap (참치 김밥) for ₩3,500. Fine, in the way convenience store kimbap always is — the rice a little stiff, nothing about it particularly fresh, but exactly what you’d expect for the price.

Lunch: Filling, But Not Satisfying

Gatsuo udon (가쓰오 우동), one from a 1+1 deal (I only ate one), ₩3,900. It basically tasted like instant ramen — not bad, but noticeably salty enough that I wanted water afterward.

Then I got curious about the Minumsa (민음사) collab bread everyone’s been talking about — a moka bread with cream filling, ₩3,700. It came with a genuinely cute bookmark, which was a nice touch. The bread itself was good, but really sweet, sweet enough that I couldn’t finish it, and ₩3,700 felt like a lot for something I didn’t finish.

Between the two, I was full, but not actually satisfied — neither one was particularly healthy, and there was basically zero protein in either.

Dinner: More Banchan Than I Expected

“Hyejaroun Hansang Gadeuk” (혜자로운 한상가득 도시락) — roughly “a generous home-style spread” — for ₩6,100. I’m 35, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I bought a convenience store lunchbox. At some point, I just stopped buying them. It came with something like ten side dishes, which caught me off guard. It tasted better than I expected, honestly — but the rice let it down a little. I’m not sure I’d reach for this one specifically next time; on a normal day I’d probably go for chicken breast and eggs instead, but I wanted to try something classic for this rather than the healthy option.

I also grabbed a bag of Jagabi (자가비) – “potato chips” – for ₩2,000 but was too full to touch it by that point.

Total spent: ₩22,200.

The Real Discovery Wasn’t the Food

Here’s what I didn’t expect going in: there wasn’t actually that much I wanted to eat. My neighborhood GS25 was mostly ramyeon and cup noodles, with a pretty thin refrigerated section — sandwiches, triangle kimbap, and a handful of microwave meals like kimchi fried rice. And even those “proper meal” microwave options ran ₩5,000–6,000, not that different from just getting the lunchbox.

Triangle kimbap was technically an option, but I realized I’ve basically never eaten one on its own. In my head, it has always belonged next to buldak. And eating ramyeon for all three meals obviously wasn’t happening.

Convenience stores are actually pretty good at solving the occasional meal. Plenty of people grab lunch there because they’re busy, and it’s easy to see why — it’s cheap, fast, and there’s usually something filling enough. But eating there for every meal was different. The problem wasn’t that there was nothing to eat. There was plenty. I just kept finding myself thinking, I don’t really want that either.

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If I did this again, I’d keep the latte and skip almost everything else. Somehow, the best thing I had all day was the ₩2,900 latte I made myself at the machine.