Along with beer and coffee, bakeries in Korea have come a long way. Long-time expats will inevitably have a bakery story, featuring some half-baked aberration that still haunts their dreams. Some folks, perhaps scarred by a congealed-cheese-and-cold-hot-dog danish, or layer cake topped with tomatoes, find it hard to believe that the average bakery today is light-years distant from the bakeries of yore, but if you haven’t ventured into to bakery for a while, it could be time for a re-visit.

On that note, I was cheered by this bit of news reported by San Francisco-based Eater Magazine that one of the Bay City’s most famous bakeries, Tartine, will be opening a Seoul Branch in late January in Seoul’s Hannam District. The Seoul branch will be the very first overseas branch of Tartine, which the New York Times food critic Mark Bittman once called his “favorite bakery in the United States”.

This Busan resident will be sure to second-guess his decision to settle outside the capital drop by Tartine on his next Seoul visit.