Even on a cold Monday night time, the wait at Cho Dang Gol was once greater than an hour.
Crowds of 20-somethings spilled out of the homey eating place in Manhattan’s Koreatown, the place steam billowed from stone bowls of soondubu jigae in a eating room ornamented with paper lanterns and musical tools. Some hopeful consumers peeked within, worried to look if a desk had spread out.
A couple of blocks away, diners at Hojokban — a sleeker, extra trendy eating place that opened remaining fall — eagerly snapped images of a plate of fried-rice dressed in an empty Shin Ramyun noodle cup like a hat. The dish had already long gone viral on TikTookay.
A little bit to the south, Atomix, a Korean fine-dining eating place with two Michelin stars, was once booked forged via the following month. And the sought-after corn cake at close by Lysée, a Korean-French pastry store? It were offered out since lunchtime.
Korean eating in New York hasn’t ever been extra attention-grabbing, dynamic or numerous. And a unmarried corporate, which owns or co-owns all 4 of those eating places and 17 extra, is producing a lot of that innovation: Hand Hospitality.
Hand has completed what many non-Western eating places nonetheless to find tricky to do in America: win large attraction whilst that specialize in a slender target market — in this situation, younger Koreans and Korean Americans prepared for a style of the power pouring out of South Korea.
“Rather than playing to an Americanized idea of what people would want from Korean food, they are just doing a version of what Koreans are eating in Seoul,” mentioned E. Alex Jung, a body of workers creator for New York mag who wrote its eating e-newsletter remaining yr.
Some of Hand’s servers discuss little English. Some dishes are known on menus most effective in Korean. “They are not trying to appeal to non-Koreans,” Mr. Jung mentioned.
Yet non-Koreans display up anyway. The corporate’s big variety of institutions displays the ever-evolving, globalized form of meals in South Korea, a rustic whose huge cultural affect has develop into one of these phenomenon that it has a reputation: hallyu.
Some Hand eating places were imported without delay from Seoul and specialize in a unmarried dish, just like the bulgogi served at Samwoojung, or the soul-warming soup gomtang at Okdongsik. Other eating places, like Atomix and Atoboy, are partnerships with Korean American cooks, or are influenced through French methodology, like Lysée or Little Mad. A couple of are extra informal and clubby, like Take31. (Hand even runs 3 Japanese eating places: Izakaya Mew, Nonono and Hakata TonTon.)
“There is no limit to what Korean food can be,” Mr. Jung mentioned, “and that is what they are demonstrating.”
But simply who’re the “they” on the head of Hand? Finding out took slightly patience and persuasion.
While lots of the staff’s chef companions are acclaimed names in meals — together with Junghyun and Ellia Park, who co-own Atomix and Atoboy, or Eunji Lee of Lysée — its lead gamers, Kihyun Lee and Kyungrim Kim, desire to stick out of the highlight. Their names aren’t indexed at the Hand website online. They declined interviews for this text a number of instances. Ms. Kim, 32, requested if she may skip her photograph shoot.
“We didn’t want to show off,” mentioned Mr. Lee, 43, referred to as Kiro and known at the website online most effective as “the founder.” A soft-spoken guy who favors saggy sweaters, he mentioned one reason why he agreed to speak was once the risk to turn the thing to his mom, who lives in Incheon, South Korea, and his two small children — to cause them to proud.
Among his friends, Mr. Lee and his corporate are already thought to be trailblazers.
“They are an inspiration and an influence to Korean chefs in Korea and New York City chefs and just American chefs,” mentioned Deuki Hong, 34, a chef and the writer of the approaching cookbook “Koreaworld,” who used to run the Koreatown fish fry eating place Baekjeong.
“They are bending New York to their tastes,” he mentioned.
Atoboy and Atomix, as an example, have landed time and again on critics’ best-restaurant lists. (Atomix was once No. 2 remaining yr on The New York Times’s “100 Best Restaurants in New York City.”) But Ms. Park, who runs the 2 puts, mentioned she and her husband struggled to seek out traders in their fresh imaginative and prescient for Korean meals till they met Mr. Lee. He partnered with them and invested in their eating places. (The Parks declined to specify the quantity.)
Hand Hospitality’s good fortune has been reinforced through its locale. New York has kind of 1.2 million people of Asian descent, and a eating public well-acquainted with myriad cuisines. The juggernaut of Korean tradition as of late surely is helping.
And the corporate’s affect extends past its personal eating places, to puts just like the Korean-Southern eating place C as in Charlie in downtown Manhattan. David JoonWoo Yun, who co-founded the eating place remaining yr, mentioned Mr. Lee inspired him to faucet each his Korean heritage and his Atlanta roots, and serve candy tea along mushroom bibimbap.
Because of Hand’s instance, mentioned Mr. Yun, 33, “more Koreans are trying to develop the cuisine into something more unique with their own background.”
Mr. Lee mentioned that manner felt dangerous when he began out in 2011. He had grown up in a restaurant-owning circle of relatives close to a U.S. Air Force base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, and moved to New York to wait the Fashion Institute of Technology. He and his pals couldn’t to find puts to hang around.
“There were no hip restaurants,” he recalled. “Everywhere was old, traditional food in K-Town.”
With a small-business mortgage of $300,000, Mr. Lee opened Take31 simply off Koreatown’s major stretch. The soju variety ran deep, the servers have been different younger Koreans and the menu toggled between Korean and Japanese dishes, as Mr. Lee had lived in Japan for a number of years. He hosted shows for his artist pals and drew a small however dependable following.
People inspired him to make the meals sweeter to draw extra consumers. “But I don’t think like that,” he mentioned. “I think we must show what is our core taste.”
He studied the eating place enterprise through studying the restaurateur Danny Meyer’s best-selling ebook “Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business.” It at a loss for words him. Why did any person wish to learn how you can be hospitable?
“For Asian people, hospitality is obvious, it is innate,” he mentioned. “It is not something you learn or develop.”
Two years later, Mr. Lee opened Izakaya Mew, adopted through Her Name Is Han, which serves conventional Korean meals. He introduced on companions — Keisuke Oku, Alex Bosung Park and Jinan Choi — to expand other portions of the enterprise. Ms. Kim joined Hand in 2016 as a server at Her Name Is Han and turned into the corporate’s leader government in 2022.
She mentioned that till just lately, when an outdoor investor post some cash, the enterprise was once supported basically through Mr. Lee’s preliminary mortgage and next earnings, which it has rolled into new eating places.
The opening of Her Name Is Han was once a turning level, Mr. Lee mentioned. Until then, maximum all Hand’s consumers were Korean. At Her Name Is Han, the ones other folks began bringing non-Koreans, who turned into repeat guests.
Hand’s manner has remained kind of the similar since then. “Usually the foods that we open restaurants around are from our childhood,” Ms. Kim mentioned. “Most of our employees are immigrants from Korea or even from Japan. We are very Asian-focused.”
Mr. Lee visits South Korea frequently to seek out eating places that can transplant effectively to New York. Hand regularly brings over no longer simply the meals, but additionally the minimalist and now and again brutalist or commercial design sensibilities of positive Seoul eating places. (The corporate works with the Korean American fashion designer Junho Choi.)
Mr. Lee’s instincts are regularly spot-on. Okdongsik, a slender soup counter specializing in gomtang, frequently attracts lengthy strains at lunchtime. Its good fortune has ended in places in Tokyo and Honolulu that can open this yr.
If a spot doesn’t to find an target market, the corporate might simply flip it into every other eating place; after the small plates eating place Palpal closed in 2023 after just a yr, it was once reborn as Hojokban. Menus repeatedly trade to attract other folks again.
“They actually keep up with modern times,” mentioned Hung Nguyen, 26, a challenge capitalist who was once consuming on a up to date night time at Take31, the place the menu options lots of the newest meals traits from Korea, like dalgona, a honeycomb-esque sweet, and mala seasoning. “When ‘Parasite’ came out, they introduced jjapaguri.”
Those inventions aren’t to everybody’s style.
“I get the feeling that if I brought my Korean elders here, they would be like, ‘What have they done to the food?’” mentioned Wook Bae, 31, a criminal aide who was once having dinner at Seoul Salon. The eating place is Hand’s high-end model of a sool jib, or consuming established order, with dishes like highly spiced octopus risotto and rose tteokbokki, cheese-topped rice truffles in a creamy, gochujang-spiked sauce.
By prioritizing a tender clientele, Hand will also be alienating its older staffers and diners, who have been frequenting Koreatown lengthy ahead of BTS turned into a family title. At Cho Dang Gol, a server in her 50s who began ahead of Hand purchased the eating place in 2016, mentioned that some dishes were sweetened to attraction to younger diners, and that she feared for her task.
“They are switching over to younger employees,” she mentioned in Korean. (She didn’t give her title, pronouncing she feared it might accelerate her go out.) “There is nowhere I can go. I can’t speak English.”
Aiden Min, 39, the eating place’s basic supervisor, mentioned that Hand had no longer altered recipes, and that there have been no plans to let older servers pass. They are a part of the eating place’s appeal, he mentioned, reminding diners in their moms and aunts.
Yet it’s laborious to not realize that folks in their 20s or 30s are those flooding Koreatown on a nightly foundation, whether or not for dinner, karaoke or a travel to H Mart.
Mr. Lee has planted Hand’s headquarters in addition to maximum of its eating places in Koreatown. This comprises Joo Ok, which Hand will open in April as a play to make the group extra of a vacation spot for positive eating.
“Whoever built K-Town is amazing,” he mentioned. “It is in the heart of Manhattan, right by the Empire State Building.”
To him, Koreatown represents the trajectory of Korean meals and tradition — a once-siloed house that, at the present time, can really feel like the middle of the universe.
Hannah Ahn contributed Korean-language translation for this text.