The Elusive Restaurant Group is redefining Korean dining in New York
Even on a chilly Monday evening, there's a wait Cho Dang Gol lasted over an hour.
A crowd of twenty-somethings filed out of the homey restaurant in Manhattan's Koreatown, where steam billows from stone bowls with Soondubu jigae in a dining room decorated with paper lanterns and musical instruments. A few hopeful customers peeked in, curious to see if a table had opened up.
A few blocks away, dinners at Hojokban – a sleeker, more modern restaurant that opened last fall – eagerly snapped photos of a plate of fried rice with an empty Shin Ramyun noodle cup as a hat. The dish has already gone viral on TikTok.
A little further south, Atomix, a Korean fine dining restaurant with two Michelin stars, was fully booked all month. And the sought after corn pie in nearby Lysée, a Korean-French pastry shop? It had been sold out since lunch.
Korean dining in New York has never been so interesting, dynamic and diverse. And a single company, which owns or co-owns all four of these restaurants and 17 more, is generating much of that innovation: Hand hospitality.
Hand has accomplished what many non-Western restaurants in America still find difficult: gaining broad appeal while catering to a limited audience — in this case, young Koreans and Korean Americans eager to taste the energy emanating from South Korea .
“Instead of catering to an Americanized idea of what people might want from Korean food, they're just making a version of what Koreans in Seoul eat,” said E. Alex Jung, a staff writer for New York magazine who wrote the food newsletter . last year.
Some of Hand's servers speak little English. Some dishes are listed on the menus only in Korean. “They are trying to appeal to non-Koreans,” Mr. Jung said.
Yet non-Koreans still show up. The company's wide range of locations reflects the ever-evolving, globalized form 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 are imported directly from Seoul and specialize in one dish, such as the bulgogi served Samwoojung, or the heart-warming soup gum tongs at Okdongsik. Other restaurants, such as Atomix and Atoboy, collaborate with Korean-American chefs, or are influenced by French technique, such as Lysée or A little crazy. A few are more casual and clubby, like Take 31. (Hand even runs three Japanese restaurants: Izakaya Mrs, no no no And Hakata TonTon.)
“There are no limits to what Korean food can be,” Mr. Jung said, “and that is what they are demonstrating.”
But who are the 'they' at Hand's head? It took some perseverance and persuasion to figure that out.
While many of the group's chef partners are acclaimed names in the kitchen – including Junghyun and Ellia Park, who co-own Atomix and Atoboy, or Eunji Lee of Lysée – the leads, Kihyun Lee and Kyungrim Kim, prefer to remain out of the spotlight. . Their names are not listed on the Hand 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 Mr. Lee, 43, better known as Kiro and listed on the website only as “the founder.” He is a soft-spoken man who prefers baggy sweaters. One of the reasons he agreed to talk was the chance to show the article to his mother, who lives in Incheon, South Korea, and his two young children – to make them proud.
Mr. Lee and his company are already considered pioneers among his peers.
“They are an inspiration and an influence for Korean chefs in Korea and New York City, and only for American chefs,” said Deuki Hong, 34, a chef and author of the upcoming cookbook.Koreaworld”, who used to run the Koreatown barbecue restaurant Baekjeong.
“They bend New York to their taste,” he said.
For example, Atoboy and Atomix have repeatedly made it to critics' best restaurant lists. (Atomix was ranked No. 2 on The New York Times' “100 Best Restaurants in New York City” last year.) But Ms. Park, who runs the two restaurants, said she and her husband had difficulty finding investors in their contemporary vision of Korean. food until they met Mr. Lee. He worked with them and invested in their restaurants. (The parks declined to specify the amount.)
Hand Hospitality's success is supported by its location. New York has approx 1.2 million people of Asian descent, and a dining audience well-acquainted with numerous cuisines. The juggernaut of Korean culture today 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, co-founder of 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.
By Hand's example, the 33-year-old Mr. Yun, “more and more Koreans are trying to develop the cuisine into something unique with their own background.”
Mr Lee said that approach felt risky when he started in 2011. He had grown up in a family with restaurants near a U.S. Air Force base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, and had moved to New York to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology. He and his friends couldn't find places to hang out.
“There were no hip restaurants,” he remembers. There was old, traditional food everywhere in K-Town.
With a $300,000 small business loan, Mr. Lee opened Take31 just off Koreatown's main street. The soju selection was large, the servers 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 following.
People encouraged him to sweeten the food to attract more customers. “But I don't think about it that way,” he said. “I think we need to show what our core flavor 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.” It confused him. Why did someone have to learn to be hospitable?
“For Asian people, hospitality comes naturally, it is innate,” he said. “It's not something you learn or develop.”
Two years later, Mr Lee opened Izakaya Mew, followed by Her name is Han, which serves traditional Korean dishes. He brought in partners – Keisuke Oku, Alex Bosung Park and Jinan Choi – to develop different parts of the company. Ms. Kim joined Hand in 2016 as a server at Her Name Is Han and became CEO of the company in 2022.
She said that until recently, when an outside investor put in some money, the company was mainly supported by Mr Lee's initial loan and subsequent profits, which it has poured into new restaurants.
The opening of Her Name Is Han was a turning point, Mr Lee said. Until then, almost all of Hand's customers were Korean. At Her Name Is Han, those people started bringing non-Koreans, who became repeat visitors.
Hand's approach has remained more or less the same since then. “Usually the food we open in restaurants comes from our childhood,” Ms. Kim said. “Most of our employees are immigrants from Korea or even Japan. We are very Asian-oriented.”
Mr. Lee regularly visits South Korea to find restaurants that could be transplanted to New York. Hand often conveys not only the food, but also the minimalist and sometimes brutalist or industrial design sensibility of certain restaurants in Seoul. (The company is working with the Korean-American designer Junho Choi.)
Mr. Lee's instincts are often spot on. Okdongsik, a narrow soup bar specializing in gomtang, regularly attracts long lines during lunch. The success has led to branches in Tokyo and Honolulu that will open their doors this year.
If a place doesn't find an audience, the company can simply turn it into another restaurant; after small plate restaurant Palpal closed in 2023 after just a year, it was reborn as Hojokban. Menus are constantly changing to draw people back.
“They're actually keeping up with the modern times,” said Hung Nguyen, 26, a venture capitalist who recently ate dinner at Take31, whose menu includes many of Korea's latest food trends, such as dalgona, a honeycomb-like sweet and mala spices. “When 'Parasite' came out, they introduced jjapaguri.”
These innovations are not to everyone's taste.
“I feel like if I brought my Korean elders here, they would say, 'What did they do with the food?'” said Wook Bae, 31, a legal assistant who was eating in Seoul Salon. The restaurant is Hand's upscale version of a sool jib, or drinking establishment, with dishes like spicy octopus risotto and pink tteokbokki, rice cakes topped with cheese in a creamy gochujang-spiked sauce.
By prioritizing a young clientele, Hand may also alienate its older employees 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 said some dishes had been made sweeter to appeal to young diners, and she feared for her job.
“They are switching to younger workers,” she said in Korean. (She withheld her name because she feared it would hasten her departure.) “I have nowhere to go. I do not speak English.”
Aiden Min, 39, the restaurant's general manager, said Hand had not changed the recipes and there were no plans to let older servers go. They are part of the restaurant's charm, he said, and remind diners of their mothers and aunts.
Still, it's hard not to notice that it's the twenty- and thirty-somethings who flood Koreatown every night, whether it's for dinner, karaoke or a trip to H Mart.
Mr. Lee has located Hand's headquarters and most of its restaurants in Koreatown. This includes Jo Okaywhich Hand opens in April as a play to make the neighborhood more of a fine dining destination.
“Whoever built K-Town is amazing,” he said. “It is located in the heart of Manhattan, near the Empire State Building.”
To him, Koreatown represents the trajectory of Korean food and culture – a space that was once a silo and can today feel like the center of the universe.
Hannah Ahn contributed a Korean translation for this article.