🇰🇷 South Korea · Family: Tous Les Jours · Region: South Korea (1,300+ locations)
Tous Les Jours (뚜레쥬르) is Korea's second-largest bakery chain, run by CJ Foodville, with well over a thousand domestic stores and a catalog that runs into the hundreds of items, sandwiches among them. The angle here is not a single recipe but a house style: a more artisanal positioning than its main domestic rival, soft sweet breads as the default carrier, and a deliberate practice of folding Korean flavors like kimchi and gochujang into otherwise Western sandwich shapes. The whole line hinges on engineering broad, comforting appeal while leaving room for a recognizably Korean accent. Get that balance right and the sandwiches read clean and approachable with a local edge; get it wrong and they tip into uniformly sweet softness with the flavors flattened out.
The builds across the line are short and share a logic. The bread is almost always soft and finely crumbed, milk bread, a pillowy croissant, a chewy tapioca-sesame loaf, or a split soft roll, chosen for gentleness rather than crust or chew. Fillings skew cool and creamy on the baseline sandwiches, ham, egg, mild cheese, lettuce, and a sweet mayonnaise, and tilt toward a fried croquette or a sauced protein when a Korean flavor is being introduced. Good execution across the range shows in proportion: filling spread to the edges so no bite is dry, the sweet bread reading as a complement rather than swamping a savory load, any Korean element present clearly but balanced against the softness around it. Sloppy execution is overstuffed bread that splits and flattens, sweet mayonnaise applied so heavily the crumb turns to paste, or a Korean accent either washed out or left so sharp it fights the gentle carrier built to ease it in.
The line varies by carrier and by how far the Korean accent is pushed. The ham-and-egg build is the plain baseline; the croissant version goes softer and richer; the sesame-bread sandwich brings a chewy, nutty register; the kimchi-croquette build is the clearest case of a fermented Korean flavor delivered through a familiar fried shape. In overseas stores the chain has adapted formats further, reworking the chewy sesame bread into a doughnut shape to match local preferences, a small sign of how deliberately the catalog is localized in both directions. As a family, the Tous Les Jours sandwiches sit inside Korean bakery-chain culture as the more artisanal-leaning option, where the bread is tuned for softness on purpose and Korean flavors are introduced through approachable shapes. Each individual build, the croissant, the ham and egg, the sesame bread, the kimchi croquette, has its own balance problem and deserves its own article rather than being collapsed into this overview.
More from this family
Other Tous Les Jours sandwiches in South Korea: