There’s a new Korean restaurant in the old Mokdong Gimbap space on SE Hawthorne: Corea K-Food. They’ve been open a few weeks now, according to the staff I spoke with, and it appears to be a different owner.
Mokdong Gimbap
We reported on the opening of this Korean restaurant, named after what is colloquially called “Korean sushi,” back in November 2023. They gained a strong fan base and offered all sorts of kimbap, each starting with a base of seaweed, rice, and egg, and you could get additions of SPAM, fish cake, bacon, and more. They also offered dishes like tteokbokki, gyoza, and katsu.
In late November they closed their doors with very little outward communication about why they closed, if they would open in the future, and basically nobody had any idea of what was going on there. Sources tell me that there may have been financial issues involved, so much so that they could not sustain running the business.
Corea K-Food: Some Background
I stopped by over the weekend after a tip I got that a new Korean restaurant had opened at this location. They do not have much of an online presence—just an Instagram and a DoorDash page. At the writing of this article the Instagram page is empty; nobody has tagged them, either.
ORSOS records indicate that Jongsoo Chang is the name of the person behind the restaurant. Over on Reddit, there was a brief discussion started last month about the new restaurant going into this space, with one user keeping their eye on the name “Hanul Korean Restaurant” in their online research/monitoring. It looks like Chang registered HANUL LLC last September, so that could account for the thinking that this would be the name of the restaurant, too…