Gisa-sikdang and a Student’s Tupperware

In New York, a restaurant recently drew attention by recreating the idea of a Gisa-sikdang (기사식당) literally a “driver’s restaurant.” In Korea, these places originally catered to taxi and bus drivers who needed quick, filling meals between shifts. The food is simple, fast, and generous.

The typical format is baekban (백반), a set meal built around rice, soup or stew, and several side dishes. Instead of ordering individual plates, you choose a main dish — perhaps bulgogi (불고기) or jeyukbokkeum (제육볶음) — and the rest of the table fills out automatically. It’s a complete meal, meant to be eaten quickly but still feel satisfying. Part of the appeal in New York is how well this format fits a growing interest in comfort food and home-style cooking. Baekban does not present itself as elaborate cuisine. It resembles what many Koreans think of as the structure of an everyday meal.

When I read the news about the success of a gisa-sikdang, it brought me back to my student days living in Yeonnam-dong in Seoul. Near my place there was a small alley with several gisa-sikdang clustered together. It wasn’t a famous street, just a quiet pocket of neighborhood diners. Whenever I craved jipbap (집밥), the taste of a home-cooked meal, I would stop by one of them for takeaway.

One day, I showed up with my own Tupperware: one container for bap (밥), a few small ones for banchan (반찬), and another for guk (국) or jjigae (찌개). The grandmother running the place noticed them right away. These were proper plastic containers, bright and new, unlike the usual tubs reused as banchantong (반찬통) — the familiar red containers that once held gochujang (고추장) or the green ones for doenjang (된장), often still bearing their original labels.

What stayed with me was the way she looked at those containers.

“아이고, 이렇게 이쁜 그릇을 가져왔어.”
“Oh my, what pretty containers you brought,” she said with a smile, using the word geureut (그릇) — the everyday Korean word for dishes and food containers.

Watching a young student hand over such neat containers, she seemed almost wistful for a moment, as if those simple plastic boxes reminded her of youth, or of a time when something as ordinary as a new piece of kitchenware could feel special.

When I ordered a two-person portion, she filled them generously, enough food to last me the entire week.

The Quiet Logic of Reusing Containers

Thinking back now, in a time when plastic is everywhere and many of us are trying to avoid it, the moment when she admired my clean set of plastic containers feels different.

At my grandmother’s house, food was stored in stainless steel containers. She called them seudaeng (스댕), a colloquial shortening of “stainless.” They were sturdy and dependable but heavy, the kind of kitchenware that felt almost permanent. The lids clanged when they closed. If you dropped one, the floor would complain before the container did.

To her, plastic containers must have felt like something from a different era. They were light and transparent. You could see the rice, the banchan, the soup inside without opening the lid. And unlike glass containers, they wouldn’t shatter if they slipped from your hands. They sealed tightly enough that you could carry kimchi (김치) without worrying about leaks. For someone of my grandmother’s generation, that must have felt almost futuristic.

Plastic food containers became common partly because of the phenomenon surrounding Tupperware, popularized by the saleswoman Brownie Wise. She turned what might have been an ordinary kitchen product into a social event through home sales parties. One famous demonstration was simple: a container filled with soup dropped onto the floor to prove it would not leak. For people seeing it for the first time, something so ordinary could feel revolutionary.

Still, the word Tupperware often functions almost like a generic term, simply meaning a plastic food container. Even as the company itself fades, the name remains. I still catch myself using it that way.

Despite the seemingly futuristic invention of banchantong, many households for a long time didn’t buy specialized containers at all. They reused whatever jars came with food. Empty gochujang or doenjang tubs were too useful to throw away. Plastic sauce jars became storage for leftovers. In my grandparents’ generation, when something was still perfectly reusable, throwing it away was simply unthinkable.

Oil bottles are another familiar example. At small rural markets, you might still find grannies selling chamgireum (참기름) or deulgireum (들기름) in reused bottles, the oil pressed in a nearby bangatgan (방앗간) from seeds they brought themselves. Often the bottles are recycled soju bottles (소주병). In a way, those bottles were never really meant to be disposable.

Most people today simply buy factory-made oil from the supermarket, but in the countryside the older way still appears from time to time. For many people of my mother’s generation, these oils carry a certain nostalgia. They signal something handmade — the real thing, made from Korean-grown sesame seeds rather than suipsan (수입산).

Perhaps that’s the quiet power of oil in a soju bottle.

Food Packed with Care

Clearly, the habit of reusing jars and bottles from store-bought food is not unique to Korea. Years later, I was reminded of this during a conversation with friends in Hungary.

One of them shared a story about his grandmother, who used empty ice-cream tubs to pack leftover food for her grandson to take home. When the family ran out of containers, they would sometimes buy a bucket of ice cream at the supermarket simply so they would have a container for the leftovers. I found that detail strangely charming.

Sunday lunches at my in-laws’ house follow a similar pattern. There is always more food than we can finish. When we leave, someone inevitably hands us a container. A portion of the weekend meal quietly becomes weekday food in a box. I never really had that experience myself, living far from my own family as an adult. Perhaps that is why these small gestures around food stay with me.

In Korea, food travels this way too. Mothers often send their daughters home with containers of kimchi, sometimes entire kimchitong (김치통) packed with different varieties. That’s what my grandmother did for my mother, sending her home with several boxes full of kimchi that would last for weeks. Those containers carried more than food. They carried care in a way that needed no explanation.

Now I notice a small echo of that habit in my own kitchen. I find myself reusing jam jars to pack a little kimchi for friends. I keep empty apple-juice bottles and refill them with freshly squeezed juice. I save jelly jars simply because I like the way they look — the glass clear and solid in the hand. They often end up holding small batches of jangajji (장아찌), vegetables slowly soaking in soy sauce and vinegar. Sometimes I keep them aside, just in case there is another moment to share a little extra food I have made with friends.

Sometimes when I see them lined up on my pantry shelf, I think back to that grandmother at the gisa-sikdang in Yeonnam-dong, watching me hand over my brand-new plastic containers. At the time, I thought I was simply bringing containers to pack my food. Only later did I realize they also came filled with generous insim (인심) Now I notice the same quiet habit appearing in my own kitchen: food packed away for later, containers kept because they might still be useful tomorrow.