![]() In recent years, restaurateurs like Shin have taken active steps to find new customers and introduce them to Korean cuisine, with the broader aim of keeping this Koreatown around for the long run. “We don’t really interact much, but in the end, I’m hopeful that we can form a deeper sense of community since we all have the same goal.” “Many restaurant owners and managers know each other but we each operate in our own kingdoms,” he says. In some ways, Korean dishes are losing some of their authenticity.”Įric Shin, the co-founder of Korean fusion spot Restaurant Silla, noticed the fierce sense of rivalry when he entered the Koreatown restaurant scene in 2019. “I notice that many Korean restaurants are catering their menus to fit the taste buds of Americans. As the number of Koreatown restaurants has grown steadily over the past decades, restaurateurs have remained hesitant to stick to specialty items, instead presenting an expansive selection of dishes so customers won’t need to search elsewhere for what they want. This expansiveness was likely born out of the competitiveness that has long existed here. Korean Spring BBQ, one of the older guards and the first wooden charcoal grill Korean barbecue restaurant to open in the Bay Area, lists more than 60 dishes, while Jang Su Jang, another highly trafficked spot focused on meats and soups, boasts over 75 menu items. While Korean barbecue restaurants may have sparked the initial appeal of Santa Clara’s Koreatown in the 1980s, today’s restaurants run the gamut, cooking foods that reflect what’s served at feasts in Korea - tofu stews, blood sausages, spicy rice cakes, braised short ribs, and black bean noodles. ![]() Still, there are myriad Korean restaurants to serve the community and, in recent months, prompted by the limited number of Korean customers and 18 months of pandemic-fueled restrictions, many are reinventing themselves to serve more diners and forge an identity as a suburban Koreatown unlike any other. Today, the Santa Clara Korean community continues to remain steady at around 3 percent of the county’s population. By 1990 that number grew to about 1 percent. In 1980, Koreans made up just 0.5 percent of the county’s population. But the Korean population in Santa Clara County has always been relatively small. Los Angeles’s Koreatown is home to a fairly large group of Koreans - more than 20 percent of the neighborhood’s population.
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