Nearly one year after private equity company, Invus, invested in emerging Korean brand, SeoulSpice, the fast-casual chain opened its first restaurant outside the DMV (D.C., Maryland, Virginia) area in Chicago.
Under the financial guidance of Invus (which was behind Cava’s explosive growth), SeoulSpice plans to expand nationally. In the near-term, the eight-unit Korean comfort food brand will focus on development in the D.C. and Chicago areas.
“Our main goal is to share Korean food with the world and our purpose is to share foodservice and hospitality that’s Korean at heart,” SeoulSpice founder and CEO, Eric Shin, said. “We are offering amazing Korean flavors in a familiar format where you pick your base, proteins, and add-ons … Everything is made from scratch—we’re out back blending up whole onions, fresh garlic and ginger to make the marinade in our beef bulgogi.”
Shin did not begin his career in restaurants, but as a first-generation Korean-American, he always had a passion for Korean culture and food. Before joining the restaurant industry, Shin was a Julliard-trained symphony percussionist who began playing with the National Symphony Orchestra in 2012. Around the time he joined the orchestra, he became interested in restaurants when he noticed that when taking friends out to eat Korean food, there were always so many language and cultural barriers, and he would often find himself in the role of translator.
“I always thought there must be some way to share Korean food in a simpler, more accessible way, and being in D.C. during the golden age of fast-casual restaurants where you had your Cavas, Sweetgreens, and Five Guys, it dawned on me that this was the way to go,” Shin said. “What a great format to share incredible Korean food that’s scratch-made with love.”
Consequently, four years after landing his dream job in a symphony orchestra, Shin made a career switch to open the first SeoulSpice restaurant in the Noma neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
“When I started getting into the restaurant business, I had so many colleagues in the orchestra tell me, ‘Eric, what are you doing? What could be riskier than opening a restaurant’? And I just tell them, ‘What could be riskier than getting a degree for classical music?’” he said.
As it turns out, that risk paid off because during SeoulSpice’s grand opening in 2016, the line was two blocks long and they ran out of food by 2 p.m., Shin said.
Over the last nine years, SeoulSpice has focused on steady expansion, but now with the boost from Invus can develop fast-casual Korean restaurants at a bit more of an accelerated pace.
The restaurant’s familiar “build your own bowl” fast-casual format is not the only inspiration Shin has taken from American culture. SeoulSpice also draws on popular and trendy American flavors to offer a remix of modern Korean cuisine. This includes adding Ranch dressing to the menu—a choice Shin said initially “sketched out” his grandma, but the goal, he said, was to embrace “a little of the old, and a little of the new.” For example, the menu offers a classic bulgogi beef bowl topped with Korean hot sauce alongside a Southwest bowl with avocado and the aforementioned Ranch sauce with a cilantro-lime seasoning.
SeoulSpice also makes its own Sriracha sauce (a choice made after the Huy Fong Sriracha shortage), and serves a jammy, soft-boiled egg marinated in a sweet garlic soy sauce as a replacement for the traditional fried egg usually served atop bibimbap.
“There’s this saying that if you go into an Asian restaurant and you only see Asian people in there, then the food is going to be great, but I want to challenge that,” he said. “It’s not about being Asian and cooking the food to only Asian people, it’s about making the food from scratch and with love. I think of my mom teaching our staff how to make kimchi from scratch, like, these are the new traditions we’ve made, and I can’t wait for everyone to try it out.”
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