Why Omakase Collapsed — It Sold a Signal, Not Fish

The counter they once called a "reservation war" sits empty. The same counter that, just three years ago, sold out for every anniversary. Naver DataLab's search-interest index for "omakase" has fallen roughly 85%, from a January 2023 peak of 100 to 15 in May 2026—below even its pre-COVID level of 20 in May 2019. On the booking platform CatchTable, "Japanese omakase," the top dining reservation in 2023–2024, dropped out of the rankings last year. Over the same span, 2,593 Japanese restaurants—omakase among them—closed (against 1,821 Chinese and 624 cafés). Raw closure counts don't measure the size of a collapse on their own, since each category draws from a different base. But search, bookings, and closures all point the same way.

So the question to ask is not "why was it so expensive." Expensive food has always existed. The real question is why it collapsed this fast. To explain the speed, start by looking again at what was actually being traded at the counter.

Boom and bust sit on one curve

Metric	Boom (peak)	Bust (now)
"Omakase" search-interest index	100 (Jan 2023)	15 (May 2026) · -85%
Press coverage	~100s of articles (2019) → 400s (2022)	—
CatchTable dining reservations	#1 (2023–24)	Out of the rankings (2025)
Japanese-restaurant closures (cumulative)	—	2,593 (2023–May 2026)

Sources: Naver DataLab · BigKinds · CatchTable · Ministry of the Interior and Safety (as-of Jan 2023–May 2026)

Price Was the Function

Omakase was more than food from the start. The counter in front of the chef bundles seating into a small number, manufacturing artificial scarcity, and a dinner in the ₩200,000 range becomes an entry signal—not everyone can come. And the experience was completed in a photograph. By September 2022, Instagram posts tagged "omakase" topped 530,000, and search interest had doubled over the two years from August 2020.

Economics has a name for a good like this. A positional good—one whose value comes not from utility but from others not having it—a good that signals status. (There's no data to call it a Veblen good outright—a good whose demand rises as its price does. But its positional, status-display function is clear.) One real-estate YouTuber called the craze "an inflation of bravado," and a doctor on Blind drew controversy by setting "monthly take-home pay of at least ₩4 million" as the bar for who deserved to come. The uproar itself is evidence that omakase was being consumed as a status signal, not as food. Nobody asks for an income bracket to eat gimbap.

For a positional good, the higher the price, the sharper the signal. It has to be expensive to signal at all. So omakase spread by swapping formats—from sushi to Korean beef (umakase), dessert, coffee. What sold was the picture of "me, seated at the counter"; the ingredient could be anything.

The Trap of Low-Capital Entry

When the signal sold well, supply followed. By SBS's analysis, omakase's business structure opened entry unusually wide. Counter-only seating keeps the store small and labor costs down; reservation deposits hedge no-show and inventory risk in advance. On the capital side, it was a low-barrier model for young founders. The real barrier, of course, is not capital but the chef's skill. But that skill threshold dropped too, and copycat shops multiplied fast.

Easy entry swelled the numbers. Coverage exploded from the ~100s of articles in 2019 to the 400s in 2022, and by one count omakase venues reached 403 (216 in Seoul). Around 2020, search interest for "omakase" overtook "buffet."

Here the status good undoes itself. A signal's value comes from scarcity—but once it pays, everyone piles in and it turns common. The moment a counter opens in every neighborhood and the Instagram feed is papered with the same photo, the premise—that others can't have it—breaks. If everyone has it, the signal value goes to zero. A status good that social media grew was killed by being made common—by low-capital entry and a glut of low-skill imitators together. So the 2,593 closures are not a failure of taste alone. They look closer to an inflation of scarcity—a flood of low-skill copies eroding average quality and signal value at once.

The Signal Breaks Before the Taste

Onto a signal already gone common, the macroeconomy bore down. In May 2026 the Consumer Price Index stood at 119.92, up 3.1% year on year, and the cost-of-living index—closer to felt prices—jumped 3.3%, its largest rise in 25 months. But a +3.1% shock alone can't explain an 85% collapse. The macro reads less as a trigger than as a trailing pressure that delivered the final cut to a signal that had been losing its scarcity since 2023. On the timeline: oversupply in 2022–23 eroded signal value, the heat cooled in 2024–25, and prices in 2026 cleared out what demand remained.

There is a competing hypothesis. A supply-cost account: the yen's reversal from its lows, rising costs for imported fresh fish, the minimum wage, and rent struck small counters with heavy fixed costs. Margin compression was likely an independent driver of the closures. But costs have outlets—pass-through to prices, adjusting the average check—and demand itself evaporated first all the same. The collapse of signal value is the better primary driver; costs are better read as a secondary pressure layered on top.

One could object that expensive luxuries naturally fall first in a downturn. True. But omakase was not a small luxury—not "lipstick." The lipstick effect describes people who can no longer afford a big luxury shifting to a cheaper substitute one. A ₩250,000 dinner is not that substitute—it is the body being substituted away from. Utility spending (a meal) can't be cut; signal spending (display) is the first thing that can. As Professor Jeong Yeon-seung diagnoses it, consumers began routing money first to other activities or to building assets, rather than premium dining.

Which leaves one proposition. A status good that has gone common and lost its scarcity is not a defensive good but the first to break under a shock. Not every status good, though. True luxury with a hard barrier to entry—luxury brands, Michelin, members-only golf—holds or even rises in a downturn. What falls is the "mass premium" (masstige) the middle class overreached to buy—the aspirational good that has already lost its moat. Omakase was precisely the latter. A single line of falling search interest can't establish a "collapse" on its own; a mature trend can hold its consumption even as search fades. But because reservation rankings and closures broke together, it reads as a collapse. It wasn't taste alone that ended omakase. The wallet that paid for the signal closed first.

The Same Hand Went to the Buffet

That closed wallet didn't vanish; it moved. While omakase fell, mid- and low-price buffets caught the rebound.

The buffet fills the seat omakase vacated

Category	Omakase	Mid/low-price buffet
Average check	Lunch ₩100,000–130,000 / Dinner ₩200,000–250,000	₩10,000–50,000 range
Trajectory	2,593 closures · reservations #1 → out	Ashley Queens 122 locations · ₩500B revenue · target 150 / VIPS 25→35

Sources: Ministry of the Interior and Safety · CatchTable · E-Land Eats · CJ Foodville (as-of 2025–Jun 2026)

Ashley Queens pulled in roughly ₩500 billion in revenue across 122 locations last year and plans to grow to 150 by 2026; VIPS, long in retreat, has expanded again from 25 in 2022 to 35.

Read this polarization as "two separate groups—one that quit the high end, one chasing value"—and you've seen only half. The pattern the aggregates suggest looks less like two groups splitting than like one wallet reordering its priorities. Koreans in their 20s and 30s, running thrift hacks and small luxuries at once, closed only the signal spending first under the macro shock and kept the utility spending. With no individual-level tracking data this is inference, not assertion—but the hand that quit omakase likely picked up the buffet plate.

Nor was the collapse total. If the hypothesis holds, the genuinely scarce top-tier counters survived; only the common middle died. The death of a signal sorts by tier.

Why Koreans in their 20s and 30s chose a dining counter, of all places, to confirm their standing isn't fully explained by economics. The critic Kim Heon-sik reads omakase as an "outlet for filling a void" in Korean dining culture—a two-way experience traded between chef and guest. This psychological hunger underlay why the stage for the signal was a narrow counter in particular—and so, when the signal cooled, the stage emptied fast too.

So omakase's obituary doesn't read as a food story alone. It is a record between the period when the signal beat utility and the period when utility beat the signal back. And if you operate or invest in premium, there's one thing to take from this. In a market built on signal, the speed of going common is itself the risk indicator. Whether the next signal good after the counter is running shoes or whisky, how fast it turns common is that market's remaining lifespan.