Seoul-Based Korean Restaurant Hojokban Just Opened in Los Angeles

Seoul-based contemporary Korean restaurant Hojokban just landed on the West Coast. The restaurant, which first opened in Seoul in 2019 before expanding to New York in 2023, debuted in the Arts District on Thursday, November 20, with a menu of jeon (pancakes), galbi, and plenty of soju. The name Hojokban refers to a traditional curved-legged Korean dining table but can also mean “food for the good people.” Seoul-based GFFG Hospitality, the group behind South Korea export Knotted, will operate the Arts District location.

GFFG’s director of strategy, Amber Koh, who played a prominent role in the opening of Los Angeles’s Hojokban, says the restaurant’s menu is “not traditional, yet it’s still very authentic Korean.” While a couple of miles away in Los Angeles’s bustling Koreatown, where generations of immigrants are serving old-school preparations of jjigae, seolleongtang, and samgyeopsal, Hojokban more closely aligns its menu with how people currently eat in Seoul. “There is a large Korean community in Koreatown where they serve really traditional, authentic food, and we have a very high respect for that,” Koh says. “That’s the very first and second generation of the U.S. immigrants. But food has always evolved.”

Salmon ssambap. Diane Kang

The majority of the recipes at Hojokban take influences from GFFG CEO Joon Lee’s mother-in-law’s cooking. “She’s something special,” Lee says. Lee’s mother-in-law’s touch can be found across the menu, in dishes like perilla noodles laced with perilla oil and soy dressing, and the Hojok galbi painted with a soy glaze and topped with Fresno chiles and peanuts. The rest of the lineup comprises cold starters like yukhoe (spelled as yukhwe on the menu), a Korean beef tartare served with crispy lotus root chips, and yellowtail mulhwe (also spelled mulhoe), a spicy raw fish soup with chilled doenjang broth. On the hot appetizer side, budae jjigae is transformed into jeon (pancake), alongside truffle potato jeon with black truffle aioli and honey fried chicken.

Larger dishes include pork belly suyuk, with thin-sliced, simmered slices of meat, and a bubbling pot of red-hued maeuntang, a spicy seafood stew with monkfish liver. Gochuchang-glazed chicken nests on top of nurungji (crispy rice), while a breaded bone-in pork chop steeps in a cream-infused rosé curry sauce. Meals can be rounded out with salmon ssambap, a salmon-topped rice bowl dotted with uni and caviar, Shin ramyeon fried rice, and truffle jjajangmyeon.

Hojokban centers its drink menu around soju-based cocktails, like the Strawberry Moon with golden barley soju, strawberry shrub, and a gochugaru salt rim, and the Gim-Let with sesame oil-infused soju and toasted gim (seaweed) syrup. Wine options span bottles like a Santa Barbara chardonnay, a Portuguese skin contact, and a pinot noir from the Willamette Valley, all available by the glass. Hojokban also offers extensive selections of makgeolli, cheongju (rice wine), and soju, including Red Monkey makgeolli, Jinmaek 22, and Hana Makgeolli yakju.

Hojokban’s interior resembles its New York location, using a similar green-and-wood motif while leaning into a dark, sleeker look. A tiled entrance opens into a stone bar, set in front of an attention-commanding grayscale painting of a hillside. Booths, lit by globular pendant lights hanging overhead, line the other side of a room, while an intricate plant wallpaper covers the back wall. Hardware and finishes for the restaurant were sourced from South Korea. Koh and Lee hope the restaurant will lend itself to many types of nights out, from a date night to a birthday party. “I think the vibe and the food that we serve are still serious in terms of cooking, but we want it to be fun,” Koh says.

Yukhoe. Diane Kang

Koh and Lee settled on the Arts District location both for its inventory of larger buildings and for its proximity to Koreatown. “We are like a college kid now leaving home,” Koh says. “We didn’t want to be too far away — we wanted to be close to the nest — but we wanted to be independent, and we wanted to make our parents proud.” Lee also points to the other long-lasting restaurants in the neighborhood, like Bestia, as incentives to open there. On December 1, GFFG will open its second Los Angeles outpost of Knotted in the same building as Hojokban.

Hojokban debuts amid a moment where contemporary Korean cooking is in the spotlight, from Koreatown’s Danbi, to the resurrected fermentation restaurant Baroo, and 2025 Eater Best New Restaurant winner, Restaurant Ki. While the latest wave of restaurants departs from the more old-school mindset of Korean cooking, they are inextricably rooted in traditions of generations that came before. For Koh and Lee, Hojokban’s arrival in Los Angeles is personal. “Hojokban is not a cookie-cutter brand,” Koh says. “We put our souls into it.”

While Los Angeles’s Hojokban just opened its doors, Lee is already looking to the future and planning an expansion path for the restaurant that could take it across the entire country. “I want us to be able to be located in rural states so that everyone can join and learn about Korean food and actually taste it so that they can better find out what they actually like,” he says.

Hojokban is located at 734 E. Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013, and is open Sunday through Thursday from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Reservations are available on OpenTable.