Some restaurants are used by many lawmakers; others are repeated by one person in particular. We ranked by a single measure: how many times the same lawmaker paid at the same restaurant, the single-person repeat count. First-place Gangga logged 160 payments from one lawmaker alone. The same hangover-soup shop appeared 160 times across six years of accounting reports.
Why ‘one lawmaker’s repeat visits’?
Lawmakers must report how they spend political funds to the National Election Commission, and those expenditure records are public. Among them are meal expenses for meetings and dining. We applied a single yardstick: the maximum payment count recorded by a singlelawmaker at one restaurant — the single-person repeat count.
This is not the total built up by many people dropping in once. It asks how many times one person used the same place. The measure reveals a restaurant fixed in one lawmaker’s routine rather than a venue broadly shared by many. As on the map’s main toggle, restaurants and bars are grouped together and tallied by venue.
The ten places one person returned to most
First-place Gangga (Jung-gu) was paid for 160 timesby one lawmaker, roughly once a fortnight over six years at the same hangover-soup shop. Second-place Suragan (Mapo) is 158; third-place Namdomaru (Yeouido), 143. All three top spots clear 140. These are not one or two large occasions, but routine payments repeated under one person’s name.
Only five places crossed 100
How rare is repetition at this level? Across the country, 9,315 restaurants logged at least one meal payment. Of those, the venues where one person returned more than 100 times— Gangga, Suragan, Namdomaru, Soboru, Hwadam — number just five. In a sample of nearly ten thousand, a hundred repetitions sits at the very tail of the distribution.
The other end of the distribution is steeper still. Of 9,315 venues, 6,610— seven in ten (71%) — have a single-person repeat count of exactly 1. Only 112 venues had one person return 20 or more times. The overwhelming majority of political-fund meals are one-off visits; strong repetition is rare. So the 27 venues past 50, and the five past 100, are in themselves rare records, each condensing one person’s six years.
When one bowl repeats a hundred and sixty times
The scene at the top is far from lavish entertaining. First-place Gangga is a hangover-soup shop at around ₩17,000 a visit. Not a costly spread, but a bowl to settle the stomach, repeated a hundred and sixty times. Fourth-place Soboru (Busan Gangseo) is a Korean place under ₩20,000 a visit; eighth-place Aludo (Gyeonggi Hwaseong) is a neighborhood cafe. The lower the price, the higher the frequency — the everyday meal hardened into a habit.
At the other end is a different kind of repetition. Ninth-place Pungnyeon Mokjang Garden (Gyeonggi Yangpyeong) is a high-end Korean set menu near ₩1.4M a visit, yet one person went 66 times. From low-cost frequency to high-cost repetition, repeat use does not have a single shape. The common point is simpler: one lawmaker’s payments kept returning to the same restaurant.
Outside Yeouido, inside a personal radius
The geography, too, departs from banquet expectations. Six of the top ten sit outside Yeouido: Jung-gu (Gangga), Mapo (Suragan, Oebaek), Busan Gangseo (Soboru), Gyeonggi Hwaseong (Aludo), Gyeonggi Yangpyeong (Pungnyeon). These are not banquet halls within walking distance of the Assembly, but repeat-use places near a district office or on the way home. That Soboru is in Busan and Aludo in Hwaseong says that one person’s daily radius was not Yeouido but their own neighborhood.
Within Yeouido the character splits too. Third-place Namdomaru, fifth-place Hwadam, sixth-place Gobong Samgyetang, and seventh-place Unsan line the Gukhoe-daero. For someone, these become repeat meal places inside the Assembly work radius. From the same meal data, follow one person’s repetition and a map appears unlike the banquet routes: the map of a lawmaker’s private meals.
Why look all the way down to one lawmaker’s repeat count? Political-fund spending is meant to be public, yet disclosed records usually survive only as tables and totals, with who repeated, and how much, hard to see. Place each venue on the map one by one and rank by one person’s repeats, and the individual movement that totals hide comes into view. Gangga’s 160 is not just a count; it is a six-year record of repeated use that a summary table never tells.
Method & source · Meal expenses from political-funding accounting reports disclosed by the National Election Commission, gathered by venue and grouped as restaurants + bars, identical to the map’s main toggle. ‘One lawmaker’s repeat visits’ is the maximum number of payments a single lawmaker recorded at that restaurant. When converting venue names to coordinates, some were mistakenly matched to a different shop of the same name, so coordinates were verified and merged into a single location. This is a snapshot at the time of payment; the ranking points to the tallied restaurant, not to any particular lawmaker. Data tally · kookrator.