Britain gets a taste for Korean food

/ Korea Times file

By Jacob Lotinga

Nottingham, The United Kingdom ― Korean food is gaining recognition in British cities outside London and the southeast, thanks to expatriates who have opened restaurants in the past five years.

South Koreans from cities including Seoul and Pyeongtaek have established flourishing businesses in the U.K., serving much-loved Korean dishes to local people, tourists and Asian university students.

Jang Ho-sung, from Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, opened an Asian supermarket called Fresh Asia in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, supplying imported food that Chinese and Korean students at nearby Nottingham University would otherwise have struggled to find. Building on this success, Jang now helps his wife run Korea House, a restaurant that opened in November 2015 in an area that has many Chinese eateries.

Jang said Korean food had increased in popularity within “the last couple of years,” gaining prominence not only in London but in Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, and Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital.

He said more than 80 percent of customers at Korea House were local people, while roughly 20 percent were students from Asian countries such as China.

For most customers, said Jang, a meal at Korea House was their “first experience” of Korean cuisine.

As evidence of Korean food’s popularity in the U.K., Jang cited ratings on TripAdvisor, where he said Korean restaurants here generally earned a score of 4.0 or above.

Jang said barbecued dishes such as samgyeopsal, bulgogi and galbi, as well as bibimbap, were especially popular with his wife Woo Mi-deok’s customers. He confirmed that there were more requests for vegetarian options here than in South Korea.

Yoon Ihn-gyu, from Seoul, helped introduce Korean cuisine to central Nottingham when he opened Sarangchae in 2013.

Yoon said that as time went by, Korean food was becoming better known outside Asia.

He said most customers were Asian students from the city’s universities, the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University, and that some tourists also came to Sarangchae for traditional Korean food.

Yoon added: “Korean people normally don’t go to Korean restaurants because they can cook at home.”

There are fewer than 400 Korean residents in the Midlands counties of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire combined, estimates Fresh Asia’s Jang. Yoon estimated that about 300 Koreans lived in Nottingham.

Sarangchae waitress Georgia Murphy said she became interested in Korean culture through her brother. She has visited South Korea twice, taking in Seoul, Jeju Island, and Busan.

Murphy said far more Chinese than Korean students dined at Sarangchae, but she added that there were more Korean students each year.

She said “soup-based” jjigae dishes were most popular with Chinese university students “because it’s like a hotpot.”

Eriko Hopps, a waitress at Sarangchae from Japan’s Saitama prefecture, said Korean food had become more popular in Nottingham “since this restaurant opened.”

Jacob Lotinga is a contributor to The Korea Times.