Daily life

Finding Kenyan food

Where to buy the ingredients, what to substitute, and where to eat when cooking is beyond you.

5 min read · Updated August 2026

You can eat well here. You cannot always eat familiarly, and after a few months that starts to matter more than you expected it to. This is what the community has worked out about sourcing what you actually miss.

African grocers

Itaewon in Seoul has long been the centre for African and halal groceries, and several shops there carry maize meal, cassava flour, dried fish, plantain and the spice mixes that make food taste right.

Ansan — particularly around the multicultural street — is the other significant hub, and often cheaper.

Outside Seoul and Ansan it thins out fast. Members in Daegu, Gwangju and Busan generally order online or arrange a group order when someone is travelling to Seoul anyway.

Substitutions that work

In an ordinary Korean supermarket:

Ugali — Korean cornmeal varies in grind; the finer sorts work. Some people mix with a little rice flour.
Sukuma wiki — Korean greens are excellent. Chard and the leafier cabbages are the closest in behaviour, and cheap.
Beef for nyama choma — available and good, though cut differently. Butchers will cut to order if you can describe it.
Chapati — plain flour is plain flour. This one just works.
Chillies — Korean chillies are milder than they look. Buy more than you think.

What is genuinely hard to replace: proper Kenyan tea. Ask people to bring it.

Online

Coupang and the other large delivery platforms carry more African ingredients than they used to, and delivery reaches everywhere. Searching in Korean helps; searching for the transliterated name sometimes works better than the English one.

Several small importers serve the African community specifically and take orders through KakaoTalk. The community WhatsApp groups are the fastest way to find the current ones — they change.

What to ask for from home

Tea. Always tea.

Beyond that: specific spice mixes, dried herbs, anything with a strong sentimental attachment and a long shelf life. Do not ask for anything fresh, anything meat-based, or anything that will upset customs.

Short version

Group orders make Itaewon prices work for people outside Seoul. Coordinate through the community.
Korean supermarkets discount heavily in the evening. Worth knowing when the budget is tight.
Cooking for Korean friends is the single fastest way to make them. Chapati travels well.

Community reference only — this is not official guidance from any Korean or Kenyan authority. It is drawn from what Kenyans and other foreigners in Korea have actually been through, and everyone's situation differs: your visa type, employer, region, bank branch and timing all change how things play out. Rules, fees and processes change without notice. Confirm the current details with the relevant official source — Immigration, your bank, NHIS, KRA, the IEBC, or the Embassy of Kenya in Seoul — before you act on anything here.