Fried Chicken and Football
My strongest World Cup memory doesn’t begin in a stadium. It begins in a humble fried chicken restaurant on the first floor of a residential building in Yongsan.
In Seoul, people tend to be careful around strangers. Keeping a certain distance is considered polite. You generally don’t start conversations with people at the next table. On an ordinary evening, there would be no reason to. That is simply how the city works, and mostly, it works fine.
It was the winter of 2022. I was with a friend, watching South Korea’s final group-stage match against Portugal over crispy fried chicken and ice-cold draft lager – chimaek, the classic pairing that’s the go-to in Korea when you want to share a night with someone.
The restaurant was dimly lit and a little chaotic. A delivery driver came and went through the door. Children wandered between tables staring at YouTube videos on their parents’ phones, their fingers sticky with the sweet and spicy yangnyeom sauce. People were eating, talking, glancing at the wall-mounted TV, pretending it was just dinner.
Korea needed to win to reach the knockout stage. Going into the second half, the score sat at 1-1.
Then Son Heung-min started running.
A counterattack, almost no time left. I remember the air in the restaurant changing before the goal even happened. People leaned forward. The whole room hushed.
Son slid the ball through to Hwang Hee-chan.
And Hwang slotted it into the corner, in the 91st minute.
Almost everyone stood up at once, shouting, screaming. People hugged whoever was sitting at their own table, then immediately reached toward the tables next to them. My friend and I were shouting at each other when we made eye contact with a group of guys our age nearby. Without thinking, we crossed the room and high-fived them like we’d known them for years.
The moment I still return to, though, is the delivery driver. He had been walking toward the door, bags of chicken and beer in one hand, eyes on his phone – a man for whom every minute of a World Cup night costs him money. When the restaurant erupted, he stopped. He set the bags down on a small ledge near the door. And for a few seconds, we all cheered as one.
Then he picked the bags back up and went to his motorcycle. We heard the engine outside. People sat down. There was still chicken on the table, still beer in the glasses.
For those few seconds, the distance had disappeared. A city that mostly keeps itself to itself had embraced one another.
