Even on a cold Monday afternoon, the wait in Cho Dang Gol It was more than an hour.
Crowds of twenty-somethings poured out of the cozy restaurant in Manhattan’s Koreatown, where steam rose from stone bowls of jigae soondubu in a dining room decorated with paper lanterns and musical instruments. A few hopeful customers peeked inside, eager to see if a table had opened.
A few blocks away, diners at Hojokban (a sleeker, more modern restaurant that opened last fall) enthusiastically took photos of a bowl of fried rice with an empty-as-a-hat Shin Ramyun noodle cup. The dish had already gone viral on TikTok.
A little further south, Atomix, a two-Michelin-starred Korean fine dining restaurant, was booked solid for the next month. and the wanted corn cake In nearby Lysée, a Korean-French pastry shop? I was exhausted since lunchtime.
Korean food in New York has never been more interesting, dynamic and diverse. And a single company, owner or co-owner of these four restaurants and 17 more, is generating much of that innovation: Hand in hand hospitality.
Hand has accomplished what many non-Western restaurants still find difficult to do in the United States: gain broad appeal while focusing on a narrow audience; in this case, young Koreans and Korean-Americans eager to taste the energy emanating from South Korea.
“Instead of playing with an Americanized idea of what people would want from Korean food, they’re simply making a version of what Koreans eat in Seoul,” said E. Alex Jung, a New York magazine editor who wrote his gastronomic newsletter. last year.
Some of Hand’s waiters speak little English. Some dishes are identified on menus only in Korean. “They’re not trying to attract non-Koreans,” Jung said.
However, non-Koreans show up anyway. The company’s wide range of establishments reflects the globalized and constantly evolving way of food in South Korea, a country whose vast cultural influence has become such a phenomenon that it has a name: hallyu.
Some Hand restaurants have been imported directly from Seoul and specialize in a single dish, such as the bulgogi served at Samwoojung, or the comforting gomtang soup at Okdongsik. Other restaurants, such as Atomix and Atoboy, are partners with Korean-American chefs or are influenced by French technique, such as Lysée or little crazy. Some are more informal and party-like, like take31. (Hand even runs three Japanese restaurants: Mew Izakaya, No no no and Hakata Ton Ton.)
“There are no limits to what Korean food can be,” Mr. Jung said, “and that’s what they’re proving.”
But who exactly are “they” at the helm of Hand? Figuring it out took a little coaxing and persuasion.
While many of the group’s chef partners are acclaimed names in food, including Junghyun and Ellia Park, co-owners of Atomix and Atoboy, or Eunji Lee of Lysée, its main leads, Kihyun Lee and Kyungrim Kim, prefer to stay out of the spotlight. attention. . Their names do not appear on Hand’s website. They declined interviews for this article several times. Ms. Kim, 32, asked if she could skip her photo shoot.
“We didn’t want to brag,” said Lee, 43, known as Kiro and identified on the website only as “the founder.” A soft-spoken man who prefers loose-fitting sweaters, he said one of the reasons he agreed to speak was the opportunity to show the article to his mother, who lives in Incheon, South Korea, and her two young children, to make them feel proud.
Among their peers, Lee and his company are already considered pioneers.
“They are an inspiration and an influence for Korean chefs in Korea and for chefs in New York City and just American chefs,” said Deuki Hong, 34, chef and author of the upcoming cookbook “worldkorean,” who used to run the Koreatown barbecue restaurant. Baekjeong.
“They are adapting New York to their tastes,” he said.
Atoboy and Atomix, for example, have repeatedly appeared on critics’ best restaurant lists. (Atomix ranked second last year on the New York Times’ “100 Best Restaurants in New York City” list.) But Park, who runs both places, said she and her husband had a hard time finding investors in their contemporary take on Korean food. food until they met Mr. Lee. She partnered with them and invested in their restaurants. (The Parks declined to specify the amount.)
Hand Hospitality’s success has been enhanced by its location. New York has approximately 1.2 million people of Asian descent, and a dining public familiar with countless cuisines. Today’s Korean culture juggernaut certainly helps.
And the company’s influence extends beyond its own restaurants, to places like the Korean-Southern restaurant. C as in Charlie in downtown Manhattan. David JoonWoo Yun, who co-founded the restaurant last year, said Lee encouraged him to tap into both his Korean heritage and his Atlanta roots, and serve sweet tea alongside mushroom bibimbap.
Thanks to Hand’s example, said Mr. Yun, 33, “more Koreans are trying to make the cuisine more unique with its own origins.”
Lee said that approach seemed risky when he started in 2011. He had grown up in a family that owned a restaurant near a U.S. Air Force base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, and moved to New York to attend to the Institute of Fashion Technology. He and his friends couldn’t find places to hang out.
“There were no trendy restaurants,” he recalled. “Everywhere there was old, traditional food in K-Town.”
With a $300,000 small business loan, Mr. Lee opened Take31 just off the main Koreatown area. The soju selection was extensive, the waiters were other young Koreans, and the menu alternated between Korean and Japanese dishes, as Mr. Lee had lived in Japan for several years. He organized exhibitions for his artist friends and attracted a small but loyal audience.
People encouraged him to make the food sweeter to attract more customers. “But I don’t think that way,” he said. “I think we should show what our main taste is.”
He studied the restaurant business by reading restaurateur Danny Meyer’s best-selling book “Setting the table: the transformative power of hospitality in business.” That confused him. Why was it necessary to teach someone to be hospitable?
“For Asians, hospitality is obvious, it is innate,” he said. “It’s not something you learn or develop.”
Two years later, Mr. Lee opened Izakaya Mew, followed by His name is Han, which serves traditional Korean food. He brought in partners (Keisuke Oku, Alex Bosung Park and Jinan Choi) to develop different parts of the business. Ms. Kim joined Hand in 2016 as a waitress at Her Name Is Han and became the company’s CEO in 2022.
He said that until recently, when an outside investor put in some money, the business was supported primarily by Mr. Lee’s initial loan and subsequent profits, which he has invested in new restaurants.
The premiere of Her Name Is Han was a turning point, Lee said. Until then, most of Hand’s customers were Korean. In Her Name Is Han, those people started bringing non-Koreans, who became regular visitors.
Hand’s approach has remained more or less the same since then. “Usually the foods we open restaurants on are from our childhood,” Ms. Kim said. “Most of our employees are immigrants from Korea or even Japan. “We are very focused on Asia.”
Lee visits South Korea regularly to find restaurants that fit well in New York. Hand often brings not only the food, but also the minimalist and sometimes brutalist or industrial design sensibilities of certain Seoul restaurants. (The company works with Korean American designer. Junho Choi.)
Mr. Lee’s instincts are often spot on. Okdongsik, a narrow soup counter specializing in gomtang, often has long lines at lunchtime. Its success has led to locations opening in Tokyo and Honolulu this year.
If a place doesn’t find an audience, the company can simply convert it into another restaurant; After small plates restaurant Palpal closed in 2023 after just one year, it was reborn as Hojokban. The menus are constantly changing to attract people.
“They’re actually keeping up with modern times,” said Hung Nguyen, 26, a venture capitalist who was eating on a recent night at Take31, where the menu features many of Korea’s latest food trends, such as dalgona, a honeycomb-shaped candy with mala seasoning. “When ‘Parasite’ came out, they introduced jjapaguri.”
These innovations are not to everyone’s taste.
“I have a feeling that if I brought my Korean elders here, they would say, ‘What have they done to the food?'” said Wook Bae, 31, a paralegal who was dining at Seoul Hall. The restaurant is Hand’s high-end version of a sool jib, or drinking establishment, with dishes like spicy octopus risotto and rose tteokbokki, cheesy rice cakes, and a creamy gochujang sauce.
By prioritizing a young clientele, Hand may also be alienating his older staff and diners, who frequented Koreatown long before BTS became a household name. At Cho Dang Gol, a waitress in her 50s who started before Hand bought the restaurant in 2016, she said some dishes had been sweetened to attract younger diners and that she feared for her job.
“They’re switching to younger employees,” he said in Korean. (She did not give his name because she feared it would hasten her departure.) “There is nowhere I can go. I can not speak English”.
Aiden Min, 39, the restaurant’s general manager, said Hand had not changed the recipes and there were no plans to lay off senior waiters. They are part of the restaurant’s charm, he said, reminding diners of his mothers and aunts.
However, it’s hard not to notice that people in their 20s and 30s are the ones flooding Koreatown every night, whether it’s for dinner, karaoke, or going to H Mart.
Mr. Lee has set up Hand’s headquarters, as well as most of his restaurants, in Koreatown. This includes joo okwhich Hand will open in April as a play to make the neighborhood another destination to enjoy a good dinner.
“Whoever built K-Town is amazing,” he said. “It’s in the heart of Manhattan, right next to the Empire State Building.”
For him, Koreatown represents the trajectory of Korean food and culture: a once isolated space that, today, can seem like the center of the universe.
Hannah Ahn contributed Korean translation of this article.
