Itaewon Class | World Food Street — The Compressed World, and What Came After

World Food Street is the Itaewon the drama is arguing for — a few hundred metres where the restaurants are Turkish and Nigerian and Pakistani and Thai, and Sae-ro-yi's line about a street that compresses the world into one place stops being a script flourish and becomes a description. Come after seven; most of it does not open until evening, and in daylight it is an ordinary road.

There is something else on this street, and a pilgrimage guide that leaves it out is not worth reading.

On the night of 29 October 2022, during Halloween, a crowd crush in the alley beside the Hamilton Hotel killed 159 people, most of them young. The alley is about forty metres long and four wide, on a slope, too narrow for six adults abreast. It is a few minutes from where you will be standing.

Since October 2023 that alley has held the 10·29 Road of Memory and Safety. At the entrance, set into the ground: *we still have names to remember.* On the hotel wall, three panels — two photographic works, one explaining what happened. A board of notes left by strangers, changed every couple of months. It is about forty metres from Itaewon Station Exit 1.

It is a memorial, not a stop on a route. Do not photograph it for content. If you go, go quietly and read the panel. And use the name the bereaved families and Korean psychologists asked for — the 10·29 disaster, not the Itaewon disaster, so that a neighbourhood is not made to carry it as an identity.

Eat somewhere on this street run by someone who came a long way to open it. That is the drama's actual thesis, and it is the one thing here you can still do.

Cover photo: a street in Seoul, by AhmedAlElq, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Area view.