Golden HOF and NY Kimchi Revive — and Rewrite — Two Great Restaurant Traditions 

Bridging the Past and Present

Ever since he was a kid growing up in Queens, N.Y., Yoo’s parents were in the restaurant business. “There’s this KFC on McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint that used to be my dad’s Dunkin Donuts, where they made their own doughnuts in this huge fryer,” he recalls. NY Kimchi was a kimchi business that Yoo’s father started in Queens some 25 years ago, and eventually opened as a restaurant across the street from Rockefeller Center where Yoo is now opening his two restaurants.

The prior iteration of NY Kimchi was a dual “Korean-style Chipotle” (Yoo’s description) and Korean barbecue restaurant owned and operated by his parents since 2012. The restaurant did brisk business catering to office workers and tourists, and was known for its varieties of kimchi, but struggled following the pandemic. Last year, somewhat expectedly but sooner than he thought, Yoo’s parents decided to semi-retire, and they handed the restaurant lease over to their son.

Yoo himself never intended to go into the family business, but he gravitated toward restaurant jobs to support himself in college, including a stint at McDonald’s, and he never looked back, even after graduating from Middlebury College in Vermont. When he moved back to New York, he landed chef positions in lauded kitchens that included Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi’s Torrisi Italian Specialties and David Chang’s Momofuku Ko. In March 2019, he struck out on his own, opening Golden Diner to critical acclaim, and overcoming the many challenges that followed, from the pandemic to a literal fire that closed Golden Diner temporarily in 2021.

“I would never have been ready for this three years ago. But because we’ve been through what we have, and we have the support, we’re just so much better equipped,” Yoo says. “It’s because of my team that I’m so much better able to handle this massive project,” he adds. That team includes his culinary director, Matt Mobilio, who’s been with him since 2018.

Yoo credits his time with Carbone and Torrisi for teaching him how to be thoughtful and thorough in creating a restaurant concept from the ground up, and it’s an approach he’s faithfully applied to Golden HOF and NY Kimchi.

Reviving the Korean Pub With Golden HOF

The divide between this new space and the tiny Golden Diner storefront in the Two Bridges section of Chinatown, where the trains rumble loudly in the background, could not be bigger. Where the diminutive diner seats just 30 inside, Golden HOF and NY Kimchi together can seat 200 at full capacity. Instead of just one tiny open kitchen, there are two — one on each floor — not to mention an intimate little chef’s counter for five that looks into one of them. Next to that is a private dining room for 20 to 25. The bar alone at Golden HOF seats 15, and was built around an imposing, stately traditional Korean hanok roof — one of the few things left intact from the previous restaurant. The staff at Golden Diner numbers 40, whereas the staff uptown nears 90.

But while the scale is different, Golden HOF and NY Kimchi are very much a continuation of what Yoo has done with Golden Diner: showing reverence for a dying breed of restaurants, but sidestepping the nostalgia trap of the past, eager to embrace the new, too. “There’s this duality of us trying to preserve something that we hold so near and dear to our hearts and memories, but we’re also trying to showcase how far we’ve come,” he says.

Yoo grew up going to local Korean hofs in Flushing, and when he interned for a summer in Seoul in college, he’d go to them all the time. “We’d have fried chicken, a pitcher of beer, get some soju, and it was awesome,” he recalls. That was 15 years ago, however, and when he went back to Seoul for the first time since, for an R&D trip last January, he sorely missed his old haunts. The bar scene in Seoul had evolved, adopting more craft breweries and embracing more cocktail culture. The word “hof,” which some folks attribute to German influence (“hofbrau”), wasn’t as prominently used, either. Yoo, however, has read that the usage of the word “hof” was inspired by the Korean War. “They’d say the word hope, which is how they say ‘hof’ in Korean, and it would [represent] the hope that the war would end.”

Golden HOF, on the ground floor, is a combination of both the past and present. Anyone who’s had the Korean fried chicken at Golden Diner will be happy to see even more fried chicken variations uptown, including a cumin Szechuan treatment, and a General Sam’s one that emulates the flavors of a popular Korean Chinese spicy garlic chicken dish, kkanpunggi. Jjajang disco fries feature pork and black bean gravy, pickled jalapenos, and mozzarella cheese. The draft beers and sool are local, from makers like Kings County Brewers Collective, Stay Green, and Hana Makgeolli, but they’ve also got bottles and cans of beer from Korea, like Sevenbrau and Magpie, plus soju from Jeju Island and sool from KMS. The three martinis on the menu draw inspiration from Korean dishes and ingredients like naengmyun (cold noodles), perilla leaves, and kimchi. The NY Kimchi martini uses ‘light broth’ kimchi made by Yoo’s father that has the consistency of a consommé, mixed with soju and finished with lemon peel.

Reinventing the Classic New York Steakhouse With NY Kimchi

With NY Kimchi, located beneath Golden HOF, Yoo hopes to create a new kind of classic New York steakhouse and raw bar that also pays tribute to his parents, which is also why he kept the name.

The restaurant will showcase 11 different types of kimchi, all made in house by his family in Queens, and they eventually hope to sell the kimchi for those who want to take it home with them. The raw bar section has everything from a Jeju seafood tower for two or four, with “ice-cold” seafood accompanied by a sesame-perilla mignonette, plus five types of crudo that all play on traditional Korean flavors and dishes. One of them, the tuna tartar, Yoo describes as a “playful mindf**k” because the tuna tastes just like tangsuyuk, a classic Korean Chinese crispy pork dish with sweet-and-sour sauce, but you’re eating it on housemade rice crackers dusted with jjajang powder — a nod to jjajangmyeon, two Korean Chinese dishes that are typically eaten together. They’ve got a few cuts of meat you can cook tableside, like LA lamb chops, an homage to Korean galbi from Los Angeles and Keens’ famous mutton chop, as well as a 30-day dry-aged T-bone basted in brown doenjang butter they serve from the kitchen.

It’s designed to be accessible, Yoo stresses, both in terms of price and vibes. “We’ll get a T-bone versus a porterhouse because those are slightly more cost-effective cuts of meat, and we’ll pass those savings onto the guest,” Yoo says. “You’ll still be able to get the strip and the tenderloin, but just a different part — the end piece of it.” Whereas a dry-aged Porterhouse steak can cost around $200 at other steakhouses in New York, NY Kimchi’s 30 day dry-aged T-bone for two is priced at $160, and it’s served with banchan, kimchi, and ssamjang. Seven ounces of skirt steak for grilling at your table costs $34, and lamb chops go for $45. A hanger steak prepared in the kitchen is just $36, served with a variety of NY Kimchi and banchan.

“Mad respect to Simon [Kim] and what he’s done [at Cote] and how they package the Korean barbecue experience,” he says, later adding, “We’re more of an everyman steakhouse, like a Peter Luger’s kind of vibe, whereas I think Cote may be more like a Smith & Wollensky.”

Something for Everyone

Given the landscape of Korean restaurants in New York City, ranging from your classic, relatively affordable K-Town spots like Cho Dang Gol, Woorijip, or New Wonjo to your Michelin-starred fine dining temples like Atomix and Jungsik, Yoo sees his restaurants as squarely in the middle.

“We’re still trying to maintain that levity of a fun, jovial restaurant where we don’t, at least guest-facing, take ourselves too seriously,” Yoo explains. “But on the back end, obviously, our standards are extremely high, and we want to keep integrity in all things and still have that fine-dining approach.”

Yoo and his head of strategy and development, Jacqueline Choi, hope locals and visitors alike will find themselves at home at both restaurants, and that some might even be up for a double dinner, too. “I think the only limitation is how much room you have in your stomach,” says Choi.

Beginning Feb. 25, Golden HOF will be open Monday through Wednesday from 5 p.m. to midnight and Thursday to Saturday from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. NY Kimchi will be open Monday to Saturday from 5 to 11 p.m. Lunch hours and delivery will follow soon after opening. Both restaurants are located at 16 West 48th Street.

Deanna Ting is Resy’s New York & Philadelphia Editor. Follow her on Instagram.

Aaron Richter is a Philadelphia-based photographer who has shot for The New York Times, Esquire, The Times of London, and many other outlets. He also hosts “A Shot” podcast. Follow him on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.