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Ever wondered what your favorite Korean idols are actually eating between world tour flights and Weverse lives? SEVENTEEN, that thirteen-member juggernaut under Pledis Entertainment (now part of HYBE since 2020), has spent the last decade turning its off-stage food obsessions into some of the most-watched fandom content in K-pop. Their appeal was never just the synchronized choreography, and after ten-plus years working around HYBE-adjacent projects, I can tell you the food scenes on GOING SEVENTEEN and In The SOOP move Weverse engagement almost as reliably as a comeback teaser. So let’s take a lap through the plates, snack habits, and dorm-cook confessions of the group Carats have been feeding for a decade.
Mingyu (민규): Mint Chocolate Chip and the “Housewife” Legend
Mingyu is the reason SEVENTEEN never needed a dorm chef. Ask any Carat and they’ll rattle off the resume: he cooks for thirteen, cleans, does laundry, hangs shelves, and once ran a mukbang battle on Tasty Guys that made comedian Moon Se Yoon actually pause and say, “wow, Mingyu really knows how to eat.” But zoom out and there’s a smart Pledis playbook here: casting the visual as the domestic anchor makes him the group’s emotional glue on-camera, which is why Bulgari picked him as their first-ever Korean local ambassador in March 2024. Luxury houses read fandom sentiment before they sign anyone.
His food declaration, though, is very not-luxury: mint chocolate chip from Baskin Robbins. The mint-choco divide is one of those recurring K-idol debates that fans obsess over (Carats have literally split into 민초 [pro-mint] and 반민초 camps), and Mingyu planted his flag with a proud selfie of the scoop. It’s a small thing, but it’s the reason parasocial marketing works in K-pop: a $4 ice cream photo becomes a personality tag that lasts a decade.
Hoshi (호시): Honbap (혼밥) at the Barbecue
Hoshi eating grilled meat by himself is not a small thing in Korean food culture. 혼밥 (honbap: eating alone) used to carry real social stigma in Korea, especially at samgyeopsal (삼겹살) tables that are historically built for group sharing and soju-fueled bonding. The younger generation broke that taboo around the mid-2010s, and idols publicly documenting solo meals gave it a mainstream face. Hoshi grilling by himself on Instagram was, without exaggerating, a small piece of cultural signal-shifting.
The choice is on-brand for him too. Hoshi runs the Performance Team and is famous for grinding practice-room hours; a hot, protein-heavy meal alone is the fuel plan of a performer who has to be back in the studio in an hour. When he and Woozi later formed the HxW (Hoshi X Woozi) subunit in early 2025 with the single “Beam,” the same discipline showed up in the music: dense, self-produced, no wasted movement.
S.Coups (에스쿱스): Steak, and Why Leaders Eat Last
S.Coups posting a nice juicy steak after a long week is the kind of photo that reads like nothing but tells you everything about SEVENTEEN’s internal culture. As leader of the Hip-Hop Unit and the group at large, he’s the one who publicly announced the second full 13-member contract renewal at their Incheon Asiad Main Stadium concert in April 2026, saying they’d “stay on the same ship and keep rowing forward.” That kind of loyalty doesn’t happen in the K-pop label ecosystem by accident. It happens when the leader eats last and celebrates in small ways.
And this steak wasn’t solo. Mingyu tagged along, which tracks with everything we know about the Coups-Mingyu (CxM) chemistry that later became its own subunit. Korean BBQ nights are how Korean idol groups actually bond, and Mingyu has been famously spotted at Itaewon BBQ spots with BTS’s Jungkook too, both 1997-liners with what appears to be a standing meat-and-soju friendship.
Joshua and DK (조슈아 & 도겸): Tteokbokki (떡볶이) and Kimbap (김밥)
Joshua and DK sharing tteokbokki and kimbap on the SEVENTEEN official Instagram is the kind of picture that hits Carats where it lives. Tteokbokki isn’t just spicy rice cake; it’s the after-school snack of every Korean kid’s memory, the food you eat standing up at a 포장마차 (pojangmacha, street tent) with cold hands in December. The appeal is textural: 쫄깃 (jjolgit), that chewy pull of rice cake against the sweet-hot gochujang glaze, is a mouthfeel Western snacks basically don’t deliver.
Pair it with kimbap and you’ve got the standard 분식 (bunsik: casual Korean street eats) combo. When Joshua, a US-raised member from LA, publicly picks bunsik over anything Western, that’s narrative gold for a group trying to sell Korean-ness to an international fanbase. DK (Dokyeom) later leaned even further into food content, going on Netflix’s Culinary Class Wars conversations with ATEEZ’s Mingi and TXT’s Beomgyu. Food shows are the new variety-show pipeline in K-content.
Seungkwan (승관): Kakao Friends Ramyun and the Boo-Log Snack Empire
Seungkwan is, and this is not exaggeration, one of the most committed food personalities in the current K-pop industry. His vlog on the SEVENTEEN YouTube channel documented him eating a green shake, probiotics, a rice cake gone bad, a hard-boiled egg, a coffee, an entire packed lunch, and a half-bowl of beef soup, in one sitting, on a shoot day for Prison Life of Fools. The clip runs ten minutes. Six of those minutes are him chewing.
The Kakao Friends ramyun-tteokbokki bowl he showed off (라면볶이, a ramyun-and-tteokbokki mash spiced up with Kakao’s IP characters) was peak Korean convenience-store product tie-in: Kakao’s Apeach and Ryan lines are massive in Korea, and idol product placements like this move actual units. Seungkwan understood the marketing before the marketing team did, which is why he became BSS’s de facto face and later carried a solo variety persona across shows like Hang Out With Yoo.
The8 (디에잇): Red Wine and the Chinese-Line Aesthetic
The8 with a glass of red wine, blazer on, lighting dimmed. It’s the most on-brand image SEVENTEEN’s Chinese member has ever put out, and it’s worth pausing on. The8 (Xu Minghao) has always operated on a different visual grammar than the rest of the group: he paints, dances contemporary, wears designer, and works with high-fashion houses in a way most K-pop idols don’t attempt until year eight or nine. The wine photo isn’t showing off. It’s saying: my aesthetic doesn’t need to translate. Carats can meet me here.
That’s the appeal for global fans. K-pop’s biggest label politics right now is how to serve non-Korean members (see also Jackson Wang, Lisa, Yeji), and The8 has built his own artistic lane without ever leaving the Performance Team. When Pledis announced in March 2026 that he and Vernon would form the sixth SEVENTEEN subunit, the surprise wasn’t that it happened. It was that it took this long.
Dino and Vernon (디노 & 버논): Seaweed Soup (미역국) for Birthdays
Dino and Vernon eating 미역국 (miyeok-guk, seaweed soup) together is the most Korean thing on this whole list. Miyeok-guk on your birthday is not optional in Korea; it’s a symbolic thank-you to your mother, who traditionally ate it for weeks after childbirth for the iodine and iron. Every Korean kid grows up with this. When international Carats saw Vernon (New York-raised) sitting down for miyeok-guk on his birthday one week apart from Dino’s, it landed as a small cultural transmission: this is how we do it.
It also captures why SEVENTEEN’s appeal has scaled globally without losing Korean specificity. HYBE and Pledis could easily have pushed the group toward Western-friendly food content (which is what Mingyu’s mint-choco arguably is), but they consistently let members drop moments like this, unedited, in Korean. That’s the “자체 생산” (jachae saengsan, self-produced) DNA at work: Woozi writes over 80 percent of the group’s catalog in his own studio, the Performance Team choreographs its own routines, and members curate their own content. The food you see is the food they actually ate.
What Jun, Wonwoo, Woozi, and Jeonghan Are Probably Snacking On
The four members who didn’t make the original food roll-call each have their own signature. Jun (Chinese-line, like The8) is the group’s honest home cook and once had Seungkwan and Woozi in tears over a Jeonghan cooking fail on chapter7teen. Wonwoo goes for coffee-and-quiet, meals that match his introvert brand. Woozi treats his producer studio like a second dorm and reportedly survives on samgyeopsal runs between vocal recording sessions. And Jeonghan? Weird food combinations he keeps trying to convince the group are genius. Carats keep the receipts.
Why SEVENTEEN’s Food Content Actually Works
The food scenes are not filler. They’re the reason SEVENTEEN’s 2024–2025 world tour crossed 1 million ticket sales across 14 cities, and part of why Pledis got all 13 members to renew contracts twice. In the K-pop industry, longevity depends on parasocial trust, and trust depends on members letting fans see the small, unglossed stuff. A Baskin Robbins cup, a solo grill, a bowl of birthday seaweed soup. That’s the currency.
Hungry after all that? SnackFever Box ships a hand-curated selection of the exact Korean snacks SEVENTEEN and their labelmates actually eat, delivered monthly. If Mingyu’s mint choco or Seungkwan’s Kakao Friends ramyun made your stomach growl, grab a SnackFever Box here and eat like a Carat.
