Hire a Japanese Chef in Busan: E-7 and Tourist Restaurant Route

Busan applies the same national E-7 test as anywhere in Korea: 60 m² of floor area, at least ₩3 million of VAT paid last year, and two or more Korean staff on employment insurance for three months. Tourist restaurant designation (관광식당업) cuts the floor area test in half, to 30 m², which is the route worth checking first if your restaurant is small. The 2026 wage floor is ₩25.89 million a year. Busan's local pool of Japanese cooks is far smaller than Seoul's, so plan to recruit from Japan earlier.

1. Two minute check: the national test

Before anything else, run your restaurant against Korea's general foreign cuisine restaurant minimums. All three apply in Busan exactly as in Seoul:

Meet all three and you qualify for one foreign cook. Miss the floor area test and you have one more option before giving up: tourist restaurant designation, in section 3. For how many cooks a bigger restaurant can bring in, what the chef must prove, and the full application timeline, see our South Korea guide.

2. Busan's Japanese pool is smaller, and here is the honest evidence

• MOFA's 2025 ranking of the 50 cities abroad with the most Japanese residents includes Seoul (14,496). Busan does not appear on that list at all.
• The Consulate-General of Japan in Busan covers the whole Gyeongsang region (Busan, Daegu and Ulsan together) and its information page does not publish a resident count.
• Korea as a whole had 44,471 Japanese nationals and 19,800 Japanese restaurants in 2025, up 1,590 on 2023 (MOFA, MAFF), with no city breakdown.
• We checked Busan Metropolitan City's tourism pages and the Busan Tourism Organisation in September 2026 for a local count of Japanese or tourist-designated restaurants. Neither publishes one.

No one, including us, can give you a precise Busan number. What we can give you is the structural reason to expect a thin pool: a city absent from a top 50 ranking that Seoul leads by a wide margin. Plan on fewer Japanese cooks who already have the right to work, and decide earlier than a Seoul restaurant would whether you will need to hire directly from Japan.

3. The tourist restaurant route: what it actually relaxes

Tourist restaurant designation (관광식당업) is a formal designation under Korea's Tourism Promotion Act, not simply "a restaurant that sees tourists." Its criteria sit in Annex 2 of the Act's enforcement rules. We checked the current text on Korea's national law portal on 27 September 2026: it is unchanged from the 2 September 2020 amendment, so the table below is current.

Here is the answer the earlier version of this page could not give: designation does connect to the E-7, but only for one of the three tests. Our South Korea guide confirms, from the HiKorea manual dated 1 September 2026, that a restaurant with tourist facility status needs only half the floor area minimum, 30 m², to be eligible. The VAT and Korean staff minimums are not reduced. So designation is worth pursuing specifically when floor area is your problem, not when VAT or Korean headcount is.

For a Japanese restaurant, the staffing line is the interesting one. A chef trained in Japan may satisfy (a) or (c): Japan's national cook licence (調理師免許) or a culinary school course are the obvious candidates, though we found no official statement on exactly which Japanese certificates the association accepts, so ask before relying on one. Keep the original certificate, its translation and proof of the training period ready; MAFF's overseas cooking skill certification (see our guide) is worth adding to the file too.

4. Applying for designation

Under Article 14, applications go to the regional tourism association covering Busan, not the city or district office. Article 15 sets the criteria in Annex 2, above.

1. Confirm the criteria directly with the association before applying, since enforcement rules are revised from time to time.
2. Assemble the staffing evidence: the qualifying cook's licence or training record, translated if issued abroad.
3. Update the menu to show dish names in at least one foreign language, and check the separate toilet requirement.
4. Submit through the association and keep the certificate on file; it supports your tourism marketing as well as the E-7 file.

We could not find a published application fee. Ask the tourism association for the current fee, if any, when you submit.

5. Budget: what we can and cannot give you a figure for

Build the budget from what is confirmed, and flag what is not:

The salary floor is where Busan differs most from Seoul in practice, even though the number is identical. Seoul's larger Japanese community gives restaurants there a bigger pool of settled residents to draw on before paying a premium to relocate someone; Busan's thinner pool means an offer at the bare floor is less likely to move a chef out of Japan or away from Seoul. Our Seoul guide sets out a method for pricing above the floor; use it, then add a margin for the smaller Japanese-speaking peer group a Busan hire is moving into.

6. What to do this week

1. Measure your floor area from the documents, not from memory, and compare it against 60 m² (or 30 m² if you pursue designation).
2. Pull last year's VAT tax base certificate and your employment insurance register.
3. If floor area is the problem, contact the Busan regional tourism association about designation, and check whether a Korean cook already on staff can meet the staffing criterion.
4. Search locally in Japanese and Korean before assuming you must hire from Japan; check every candidate's residence status.
5. If you do need to hire from Japan, read our South Korea guide's chef evidence and timeline sections, and ask your administrative agent for a written fee quote covering both designation and the E-7.

General information gathered from official sources in September 2026, not legal or immigration advice. Designation and E-7 processing details can change and immigration officers apply discretion; confirm current criteria and fees with the Busan regional tourism association, the immigration office handling your file, or a licensed administrative agent before acting.