Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Keeyoung Kim. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Keeyoung, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

My business partner and I started dreaming of owning our own restaurant concept in 2014 while I was living in the DC area. The idea came up in the same way many great ideas (or terrible ideas) come up, over lots of food and lots of drink. After a quick discussion, we started meeting to continue talking about the dream. To be honest, I don’t think we ever thought this could be a reality but it was an excuse for us to hang out and get excited about the potential of opening a restaurant. Discussion slowly became market research, menu testing, preliminary budgeting and eventually looking for actual spaces. Were we really going to do this? After several months of this, we realized that there were too many barriers to entry in the DC restaurant industry, particularly financial barriers. We decided at this juncture, it was wisest to put this idea on hold.

Fast forward about a year to early 2015, I took a trip to Kansas City to visit some friends doing some non-profit work. Little did I know that this would be a trip that would ultimately lead me to decide to move to KC. I had met a group of people who wanted to open up a cafe space but was lacking the operational knowledge to execute this plan. They asked me to consider moving to KC to be part of this. I said yes.

I moved to KC in January 2016 where I went straight to work trying to build a concept for the cafe space. However, in April 2016, conversations died down and ultimately, all parties decided opening this type of business was not for them. I began working as a barista at a local coffee shop, all the while wondering what the heck I was doing in KC if there was no business to build. Out of nowhere, my current business partner, a close friend of mine, brought up the idea of doing what we had dreamed in 2014. I said yes.

I began putting plans into place, going from coffee shop to coffee shop to put idea on paper. Any chance I had, I would talk about the dream to anyone who cared to listen. Then on Easter Sunday of 2016, I went to a coffee shop. I began talking to the owner about this dream. Then another customer started chiming in about how awesome a Korean restaurant would be in KC proper. This customer eventually became the first graphic designer we worked with, who is responsible for many of the Sura Eats branding that remains to this day. He then introduced me to a restaurant owner friend of his (who he also did some design work for) who eventually invited me to do a pop-up at his sandwich spot in July 2016.

Few friends and baristas I worked with offered to help at the pop-up. We had no idea what we were doing but we cooked our hearts out. We had 6 menu items that we scrambled to prep for days leading up to the event. We had a meager Instagram following and that and word-of-mouth was the only way people knew about this event. 30 minutes prior to the pop-up, there was a line of people waiting for the Sura Eats food. The evening was nothing short of disastrous (from an operational standpoint) but we sold out in about an hour and half. A friend offered her services to take some photos. She mentioned that she did some freelance work from a local publication called Feast Magazine and said she would submit the photos to her editor but told me not to hold my breath, nothing would likely come of it. A few weeks later, I get a call for a short interview. A month later, we were on a list of “Most Anticipated Restaurants” – we definitely did NOT see that coming. After that, every pop-up we did were sell-out events, with the exception of Halloween weekend 2016. We started looking for spaces with realtors, who ended up dropping us because they “didn’t really understand the concept and what we were trying to do”. Early 2018, the owners of Parlor Food Hall reached out to us and asked us to be part of a new food hall they were opening as an anchor tenant. We agreed and opened our first location September 2018.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Keeyoung Kim. I was born in Seoul, South Korea. We immigrated to the states when I was a year old. Growing up, I watched my parents work tirelessly in the restaurant industry and frankly, wanted nothing to do with it. It made no sense to me that a former art teacher (mom) and a business person (dad) would decide to leave the comforts of familiarity and come to the states. They would tell me often that they came here for me, so I can go to a great university and become a doctor or a lawyer. I was on my way to fulfill their dream when I started attending Northwestern University. The engineering school is where I first landed but I hated it. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so I figure learning about business was pretty practical for real life. Unfortunately, the closest thing to a business major was Economics. To my disappointment, most of the classes were mostly theory-based with a few practical economics electives. I didn’t know what else to do so I finished my time and got a degree in Economics (yay).

Junior year of college, I started working at J.Alexanders, a casual, fine-dining steakhouse. This is where I began to fall in love with the restaurant industry. I was so fascinated by the people, the rushes during an evening, and the idea that so many individual ingredients can make up such a simple dish like Not Your Ordinary Mac and Cheese (they used gruyere!). During my senior year of college, I was recruited by a new concept called Pinstripes in Northbrook, IL as a server trainer. Upon graduation, they offered me a management position, which I happily took. My parents were not very happy.

I really do blame my parents for being where I am now. Growing up, I was a kid with parents in the industry. I didn’t like it then but I guess the lifestyle was ingrained in me. My parents were phenomenal cooks and they were always hosting and serving people. They may not have held positions of high honor from the outside looking in but their humility to serve is arguably the motivator and vision for how I want to operate the businesses.

We started Sura Eats at an opportune time in KC where there was growing curiosity of foods from different countries. Many of the people we served in our pop-ups and even today are non-Korean folks. We believe that through our food, we are introducing people to Korean culture and instilling curiosity. Personally, I see it as inviting complete strangers to dinner at my parents’ home.

Our food is a journey to honoring traditional Korean food, as close as to my mom’s I can get it, but adding my personality and experience to it. You may see different interpretations of traditional dishes but that’s because my lens is both Korean and American and I believe using certain techniques, adding some non-Korean flavors, is representing my experience.

We recently opened up Chingu, a full-service restaurant, that allows us to bring another element of Korean culture (more food and drink!) to KC. On my staff now, I have four amazing individuals who have been with me from the start of Sura Eats (6 years!). I love being able to introduce my culture and favorite food to the city but I’m even more proud of my team, who have bought into the vision and stuck with me for years. That’s who we want to be – a business who cultivates growth both personally and for the company, inspires people to be awesome people, giving back to our city and community, while representing Korean culture well.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I thought running your own business meant that everything had to be perfect, which in turn meant you had to be part of everything because you know, you’re the best at everything (ha!) – my vision, my way. With this mindset, I quickly got exhausted and it sucked the joy out of the day to day. I learned that I HAD to start leaning on people. I learned that though I could do a lot of things well, I needed to stick to my strengths and empower people to discover and take ownership of different aspects of the business. At the end of the day, I was letting go of control. This allowed me to:

1) become a business that develops and champions people
2) spend less time in the kitchen and grow the business in other areas
3) be a bit more relaxed and happy

If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?

Diversification has become the name of the game for us. I would say my main motivator for this is to build a business that can employ lots of people for a LONG time while giving them opportunities to do what they love to do for the business (ie. a cook who become a manager who ultimately becomes part-owner of one of our concepts). It’s easy in the restaurant industry to get stuck in your role. While consistency and longevity is necessary to do well in this business, we believe in diversifying services/products we offer to the community, while staying in our “lane” (mostly).

We have bottled and sold our sauces over the counter starting in 2020. Within the past 2 years, we’ve been able to wholesale them to 3 different locations. We recently signed a licensing deal with a co-packer with far greater reach than us, to produce, bottle and sell our sauces. We’re not at a point to start a completely different business (yet) but we’re exploring and getting our feet wet. We are working towards distilling our own soju, “co-packed” by an amazing local distiller. We are in the process of opening a coffee shop, Chingu Coffee Co, where we work with a local coffee importer to carefully select amazing coffees from all over the world.

It may seem like we are being stretched thin but we have awesome people who are responsible for overseeing all the different revenue streams. We’re not sure where it’s all going to go but we know we will never find out if we don’t try.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.suraeats.com, www.chingukc.com, www.chingucoffeeco.com
• Instagram: @sura.eats, @chingu.kc, @chingucoffeeco

Image Credits
Alyssa Broadus