Deoksugung's AI imperial banquet at Dondeokjeon — free to March 2027

Dondeokjeon, the Western-style guest hall at Deoksugung Palace opposite Seoul City Hall, has opened an AI exhibition about the French-style banquets of the Korean Empire's court. Put together by the Deoksugung Palace Office of the Korea Heritage Service with the company Daberoart, it is a hands-on show: you choose ingredients, and generative AI turns that combination into your own imperial dish. It runs all winter, free, in the very building that was put up more than 120 years ago to receive foreign envoys.

Below: how a session works, what else is on show besides the AI, and how far the dishes on screen rest on history, followed by opening hours and the way in. Dates, venue and prices were checked against the Royal Palaces and Tombs Center's event page, the Korea Heritage Service press release of 2 November 2026, and the official hours and admission pages.

How does the AI imperial banquet work?

The only thing you do yourself is choose ingredients. Sensors in the table and the AI take it from there. Following the press release, a session goes like this.

1. Choose — from 30 model ingredients used at Western-style banquets of the period, including lamb, pheasant, salmon, truffle and caviar, pick the ones you want and set them on the banquet table.
2. Detect — sensors in the table read which ingredients you have put down.
3. Generate — a generative AI draws the dish, and a large language model (LLM) writes its menu name and a short story about it in Korean and English.
4. Cook — the cooking plays out on a "digital kitchen" screen on the wall.
5. Serve — the finished dish is projection-mapped onto an empty plate on the central table. The whole thing takes about 5 minutes.

A different combination gives a different dish even when the ingredients overlap, so it is fun to swap ingredients within a group and compare results. Because the menu names and stories also appear in English, it works for mixed groups of Korean and non-Korean visitors.

What else is there besides the AI?

The exhibition has two parts: films and objects about the court's banqueting culture, and the AI session described above. Objects are placed before and after the AI area, so you see the real things behind the digital table on the way in and out.

• A 27-metre LED media wall — a film of the Korean Empire's civil and military officials and foreign diplomats in full court dress, seated at a banquet, fills one wall. The Deoksugung Palace Office says costumes and decorations were researched for accuracy, with chandeliers, lighting and sound adding to the atmosphere.
• About 60 objects — items linked to court banquets, from a chandelier with the plum-blossom (ihwamun) emblem to iron cooking tools and Western tableware with the same emblem, along with clothing and books. A full list of the 60-odd pieces has not been published.
• Western kitchen tools — the press photos show early 20th-century moulds for jellies, puddings and cakes, and pans and cooking tools, from the National Palace Museum of Korea's collection: traces of the new kitchen the court fitted out for banquets for foreign guests.

Are the dishes on screen real Korean Empire menus?

The dishes the AI makes are inventions, composed on the spot from whatever you pick. Their starting point, though, is the record. Emma Kroebel, the German who ran banquets for the Korean imperial court in 1905–1906, left banquet menus in her book Wie ich an den Koreanischen Kaiserhof kam (How I came to the Korean imperial court). In 2017 the Korea Heritage Service (then the Cultural Heritage Administration), with Josun Hotels & Resorts, Baewha Women's University and the National Trust for Cultural Heritage, used those records to recreate a 12-course French-style dinner at Seokjojeon in Deoksugung. The AI content was developed from that recreation and nearly a decade of the agency's research on court banquets.

Dishes shown in photographs of the recreation include beef tenderloin with truffle, grilled fish with mushrooms, and lamb steak. The menu follows the usual order of a French dinner, from a clear soup through fish, meat and vegetables to dessert and coffee.

What is Dondeokjeon?

Dondeokjeon is a Western-style guest hall built inside the palace (then called Gyeongungung) in 1902–1903 to receive foreign envoys for the ceremony marking the 40th year of Emperor Gojong's reign. It was meant to show the Korean Empire as a modern state on equal terms with the Western powers, but cholera broke out and the 1902 ceremony lost its international guests, shrinking to a domestic event that November. The building is thought to have been pulled down between 1921 and 1926, when the Japanese colonial authorities turned the palace into a public park, and a children's playground took its place.

The rebuilt Dondeokjeon uses its ground floor for a film room and a special exhibition gallery, and the AI banquet show sits on that floor. For a building whose job was serving Western dinners to foreign guests, there are few better places in the palace for a show about court banquets.

When to go, and in what order to see the palace

Remember that there are two sets of hours. Deoksugung is open until 9 pm (last entry 20:00), but Dondeokjeon closes at 5:30 pm (last entry 17:00). If you come after lunch, enter through Daehanmun, see the exhibition first, and walk around Seokjojeon and Junghwajeon after dark.

The exhibition runs from early November to late March, so you can choose your season, from the last autumn leaves to the palace under snow. After a snowfall, walk on from Dondeokjeon to the courtyard of Junghwajeon.

Getting to Deoksugung and buying a ticket

The main gate of Deoksugung is Daehanmun, across from Seoul Plaza. There is no parking inside the palace, so the subway is the easier way in. The exhibition needs no separate ticket: buy a Deoksugung admission ticket at the Daehanmun ticket office and that is all.

From the exhibition, follow the Deoksugung stone-wall road (Deoksugung Doldam-gil) beside Daehanmun towards Jeong-dong, the quarter where the Korean Empire's legations stood, and you have a full day out.

Getting there if you do not read Korean

City Hall Station on Lines 1 and 2 is the nearest stop, and Seoul's subway announces and signs every station in English. Daehanmun is a short walk from the station. Tickets are sold at the gate, and there is nothing to book, so you need neither a Korean phone number nor a Korean card. Inside, the AI part of the exhibition writes its menu names and stories in English as well as Korean; the official notices do not say whether the wall texts and object labels are translated, so expect the historical panels to be mainly in Korean. The Royal Palaces and Tombs Center publishes admission and hours in English (opens in a new tab). Visitors in hanbok enter the palace free.