Bob Levy likes to try ethnic foods. But his only experience at a Korean restaurant left him cold.
As he recalls it, he was put off from the start by the dingy, uninviting exterior. Then came indifferent service, culminating with what he describes as unfamiliar, smelly dishes.
“I was really turned off by the location, the food, the decor, the service, just about everything,” the Chicago photographer remembers. “Would I go back? No.”
Not exactly a pleasant way to begin a new dining experience. But it’s what many non-Korean diners have gone through, in whole or part, while trying to get to know Chicago’s large and diverse Korean restaurant scene.
Consequently, many who eagerly go Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese still shy away from these enigmatic eateries.
Odd when you consider that Koreans are the largest Asian population in Chicago, with dozens of fine restaurants serving a tasty, healthful and varied cuisine.
Ironically, though, the community’s large numbers (estimated at 150,000 in the metropolitan area by the Korean American Association of Chicago) may be partially responsible for the slow crossover. For years, their faithful patronage has allowed the eateries to survive quite well as businesses for Koreans by Koreans, with little impetus to change. But with the number of Korean restaurants in Chicago reaching critical mass, there’s a big push in the community to learn how to adapt.
“This comes up in just about every meeting of the Korean Restaurant Association,” says business consultant Hyunjung Bae, “but not everyone agrees on the answers.”
One answer most can agree on, however, is a need to open up physically and socially to their target customers.
But some aspects of opening up, like getting rid of the restaurants’ painted, frosted or screen covered windows, run contrary to Korean traditions.
“Korean people don’t like to be exposed to others when they are in the restaurant,” says Jin Lee, director of business planning and development at the Albany Park Community Center. “If you are eating with your close friends, you don’t want people to pass by and look at your food. You can feel naked. That is why the Koreans like to cover the windows.”
Covered windows may give diners a sense of privacy, but they can also give potential first-time customers a sense of uneasiness about what they might find behind the door. New restaurant owner Janice Kim this fall opened So Gong Dong Tofu House, one of Chicago’s first Korean restaurants featuring a window looking into the dining room.
“Most Korean restaurants have closed windows because the Korean people are more comfortable hiding and not showing off from inside,” says Kim, who came to Chicago 18 years ago. “But I didn’t like that. . . . Because still Korean food is not so popular with American people, I wanted to show what we serve and how people eat.”
Kim’s decision seems to have paid off as her Bryn Mawr Avenue restaurant is one of the few on a strip of Korean businesses that regularly attracts non-Koreans. And her example seems to be catching on as three more Korean restaurants (Soju, Country Co Co and Seoul Dook Bae Gee) have decided to adopt this tradition-breaking design. Miyoung Park, owner of Seoul Dook Bae Gee, decided to open her windows after eight years of covering them with screens, she says, to allow more customers to see her attractive decor and recognize that the place is indeed a restaurant.
But these progressive businesses are still anomalies. Most could use the advice of Lee, whose spends a lot of time helping Korean business attract a crossover clientele.
His first suggestion to the restaurants is to hire more English speakers. His second is to create picture menus or buy food models that will fill in where the language leaves off.
Some of these changes are easier said than done. For instance, plastic models of edibles can cost up to $100 apiece and have to be ordered from Korea. And for many budding businesses, hiring English speakers, who can work in the larger community and thus command higher pay, can be a big expense. Lee says he understands the restaurateurs’ concerns.
“Of course, all the employees should speak the language,” Lee says, “but many of these places are mom and pop businesses and it is hard for them to pay the wages for someone who speaks English. Their kids don’t always want to stay around and work for them, so they hire someone who knows about Korean foods but doesn’t speak English.”
It’s this language barrier that he believes is largely responsible for the misperception that Korean waitstaffs are rude.
“That is totally, totally untrue,” he says of the reputation for rudeness. “But sometimes when people don’t speak a lot of English and they see an American customer come in, they freeze. They don’t know what to say. They want to greet the customers smiling but sometimes their facial expression will freeze.”
Other community observers believe the grumpy-waitress perception has more complex roots.
“It’s a long story,” says Bae. “But basically it’s because service occupations in Korea have never been seen as particularly desirable. It implies you are a servant to somebody, and that has a sort of stigma to it in the Korean mind. On top of that, a lot of the people who work as waitresses in the Chicago area are not doing it because they don’t have other skills. Many of them can’t work in skilled professions for which they’re trained because of visa status or major language barriers. So they end up working as waitresses, and that can create some personal resentment. And then they are catering to Korean clients who have an attitude that they are just waitresses so it is somewhat of a vicious circle.”
In a Korea Times editorial last spring Lee addressed the topic using an anecdote that has been well-circulated in the community.
“A non-Korean customer walked into a Korean restaurant and the waitress, instead of asking `How can I help you,’ said `What do you want?’ So the customer left,” he explained. “In Korean, that phrase can be expressed with a respectful word or a familiar word, but that doesn’t come across in English. When someone has a lack of verbal skills, they use simple speech, and the customer doesn’t understand and they walk out.”
Bae says that she cannot stress the service aspect of restaurants enough to the Korean clients whom she advises.
“I tell the owners all the time that training is very important,” she says. “Half of it is food and half of it is service, and the first thing you see when you walk in is not the food. It’s the waitress. It seems to be a hard lesson to learn.”
And then there is the food. Lee believes that one of the reasons Korean food has not taken off cross-culturally is that it does not follow the paradigms of other, better-known Asian cuisines. Instead of the rice-plus-stir-fry model, Korean food leans more toward meal-in-a-bowl soups and noodle dishes, all often accompanied by a dozen little salads, pickles or relishes. One of the most common is the spicy fermented cabbage pickle called kim chi.
“When my college roommate first saw kim chi, he thought it was too strong and spicy so he was kind of scared away,” says Lee, whose roomate eventually grew to enjoy Korean food. “Smellwise, it is kind of strong so people tend to avoid it, but those who try it once or twice fall in love with it.”
While service and food are important elements in the equation, other off-putting factors, like cryptically translated signage, hit customers before they even open the door.
“Right now Korean restaurant signs are about 70 percent in Korean and 30 percent in English,” Lee says. “Some places don’t have any English, and people don’t know if it is a restaurant or a grocery or whatever. So we want them to make sure that it says XYZ restaurant at least.”
Bae says that other obstacles include well-worn stories in the community about restaurants that invested a lot in trying to attract non-Koreans and failed. Among the most notable is downtown Chicago’s Woo Lae Oak, which closed in November to try its luck in a yet-unnamed suburb. According to Bae, the suburbs are where Korean restaurants have been most successful in broadening their clientele.
Many see the real key to crossover success not in incremental change so much as in the coming of age of a second generation — the so called 1.5 generation that came to the States when they were young. As this genertion has started to open retail stores, coffee houses and eateries, they have already shown a willingness break the traditional rules to serve a more diverse clientele and share Korean-American culture with the broader society.
“Korea is a small country and for years the people just lived by themselves with one blood so they tend to not be so open minded to other nationalities,” says Kim. “But now the second generations are coming up and they are much more open. They will change things.”
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A SHORT GUIDE TO KOREAN EATS
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Although many Korean restaurants are making themselves less enigmatic to non-Koreans, a parallel, possibly confusing trend, is also emerging: specialization. To help readers decipher what they can expect from these specialized eateries, we offer the following guide:
Kalbi houses: May serve some soups and rice-based, one-dish meals, but their specialty is grilled beef ribs (kalbi) and marinated beef slices (bul gogi) eaten wrapped in red leaf lettuce with rice and assorted pickled salads.
Tofu restaurants: Fare consists almost exclusively of hearty tofu soups served in earthenware pots. Spiciness can be adjusted to order as can extra ingredients such as kimchi, beef, seafood, miso and pork. The soup is always served with a pot of rice.
Noodle, dumpling (or mandoo) houses: Specialize in steamed, boiled or fried dumplings that can be eaten as appetizers or in soups. They also serve standard rice and noodle dishes like bi bim bap and chap chae.
Ginseng soup (or sam gae tang) restaurants: Serve a fortifying soup made with a cornish hen that is stuffed with glutinous rice, Chinese chesnuts (jujubes) and ginseng roots. A legume-studded rice is served on the side. You may also find homemade tofu in clear broth as well as ginseng shakes.
