Every time a Hollywood star lands in Seoul, Korean food lovers all ask the same question before anything else: what did they eat? In August 2026, that question got an unusually satisfying answer. Christopher Nolan, Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, and producer Emma Thomas landed in Korea to promote "The Odyssey" — and along the way, they turned a standard press tour into something closer to a whirlwind tasting tour of Korean food culture, from a neighborhood bakery to a Michelin-starred tasting menu.

This wasn't a staged food segment. It was four famous people wandering Seoul on their own time, discovering the same things millions of visitors discover every year — and for food bloggers like me, it's honestly a pretty fun excuse to talk about what they ate.

What Is "The Odyssey," and Why Was Everyone in Seoul?

"The Odyssey" is Christopher Nolan's sprawling adaptation of Homer's ancient Greek epic, with Matt Damon playing Odysseus, the king of Ithaca trying to find his way home after years of war. The cast around him reads like a greatest-hits list of contemporary Hollywood — Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, and more — and the film became a genuine phenomenon in Korea. It opened on August 5, and by its third weekend in theaters, it had crossed roughly 7.1 million admissions nationwide, holding the No. 1 spot at the Korean box office for weeks running.

For Nolan, this trip was actually his first time setting foot in the country, despite decades of his films — Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer — pulling in tens of millions of Korean moviegoers over the years. He'd reportedly been trying to make a Korea trip happen for a while, and this time it finally came together. But once the press conferences wrapped for the day, the real story — at least for those of us who care more about food than box office numbers — started happening on the streets of Seoul.

Christopher Nolan and the Salt Bread That Broke the Internet

Here's the detail that surprised a lot of fans: it was Nolan, not Damon, who ended up going viral for a food moment. While walking along Seoul's Cheonggyecheon stream on a day off, Nolan tried Korean salt bread — sogeumppang — on the recommendation of his son's Korean American girlfriend. His reaction, more or less verbatim from the press conference: it was "extraordinary and absolutely wonderful."

If you haven't had salt bread, the hype is earned. It's a laminated, butter-enriched roll with a crisp, almost croissant-like exterior and a soft, pillowy interior, finished with a light dusting of flaky salt that plays against the buttery sweetness of the dough. Think of it as the lovechild of a croissant and a dinner roll, and you're close. Salt bread has been one of Korea's biggest bakery trends for the past several years, with entire bakeries built around little else, and it's increasingly showing up at Korean and Asian bakeries across the U.S. too — so this is a genuinely accessible one if you want to try what Nolan tried.

How to Try Korean Salt Bread in the U.S.

• Korean bakery chains: Look for Korean-owned bakeries or Korean grocery store bakery counters (H Mart locations often carry a bakery section).
• Asian bakery cafés: Many Asian fusion bakeries now carry a salt bread or "salt roll" as a menu staple.
• Making it at home: Salt bread dough is enriched and butter-laminated, similar to a soft brioche. If you're comfortable with basic bread baking, look for a milk bread or brioche base recipe, add a butter cube to the center before the final proof, and finish with a sprinkle of flaky sea salt and melted butter after baking.

Matt Damon's Korean Baseball Night

While Nolan was hunting bakeries, Matt Damon — making his first trip back to Korea in a decade — went a completely different direction. He was invited to a KBO League game between the Kiwoom Heroes and SSG Landers at Gocheok Sky Dome, by a friend who happens to work as an agent for one of the Heroes players, and by his own account was blown away by the atmosphere: coordinated fan chants, entire sections singing in unison, an energy he described as a totally different way of watching a ballgame.

Korean baseball is as much a food experience as a sporting one. Fans in the stands are usually working through fried chicken delivered straight to their seats, tteokbokki (chewy rice cakes simmered in a spicy-sweet gochujang sauce), gimbap, and dried squid with beer. If you want to recreate a small piece of what Damon experienced without a flight to Seoul, a spread of gimbap and tteokbokki in front of a ballgame on TV gets you surprisingly close.

Charlize Theron's Korea Story Actually Started Months Earlier

Of the whole group, Theron's connection to Korea turned out to be the deepest — and it predates this trip by months. At the press conference, she revealed that a few months earlier, she'd taken a quiet, unannounced trip to Korea with her ten-year-old daughter, walking around Seoul all day and making Korean friends along the way. What she didn't fully spell out on stage, but what surfaced separately, is that part of that trip included a cooking class in Hongdae, where she and her daughter rolled their own gimbap and made tteokbokki from scratch with a Korean chef — and by the chef's own account, Theron danced after tasting the gimbap she'd just rolled herself. It's a genuinely charming image: an Oscar winner, off-duty, doing a little happy dance over homemade kimbap.

The Fine-Dining Finale: Eatanic Garden

The group's most formal food moment came at Eatanic Garden, a one-Michelin-starred restaurant in Gangnam run by chef Son Jong-won, a familiar face to Korean food fans from Netflix's "Culinary Class Wars" and the long-running show "Please Take Care of My Refrigerator." The tasting menu leaned into seasonal Korean ingredients — seaweed, jang (Korea's family of fermented sauces, including doenjang and gochujang), seafood, vegetables — showing off how high-end Korean cooking reinterprets traditional flavors rather than abandoning them. The visit happened to land on Nolan's birthday, and the restaurant marked the occasion with a dessert shaped like a Trojan Horse, tying the meal thematically back to the film. It's a nice bit of symmetry: a Hollywood crew retelling an ancient Greek epic, discovering modern Korean fine dining in the process.

Try K-Food in America: A Starter Guide

You don't need to fly to Seoul to taste what the cast experienced. Here's a simple starting point:

FAQ

What is Korean salt bread made of?
It's an enriched, butter-laminated bread dough (similar to brioche or milk bread) baked with a butter cube in the center and finished with flaky salt and melted butter on top.

Where can I find Korean salt bread in the U.S.?
Korean bakeries and Korean grocery store bakery counters — H Mart is one of the most widely available chains in the U.S. — are the most reliable places to look.

Is Korean baseball food different from American ballpark food?
Yes — Korean stadiums lean toward shareable, saucy snacks like tteokbokki and fried chicken, plus gimbap, rather than hot dogs and nachos.

What is jang in Korean cooking?
Jang refers to Korea's fermented sauce family, including doenjang (fermented soybean paste), gochujang (fermented chili paste), and ganjang (soy sauce) — the flavor backbone of most Korean cooking.

Odysseus traveled a long way to find his way home. We can take a much shorter journey — sometimes, one bite of K-food is all it takes to discover a piece of Korea.