The celebrity chef-created Korean restaurant chain has opened its fourth U.S. location in its first outpost in Northern California, Oakland. Conceived by TV chef Baek He Jong-won, Hanshin Pocha serves a late-night tantalizing clientele in the Temescal neighborhood of Telegraph His Avenue 4869. The chain’s interiors are dark, neon-lit and vibrant, making you feel like you’re experiencing a street vendor in Korea. More specifically, the restaurant draws its inspiration from the birth of street food called ‘pocha’, and chefs who originally used covered wagons to cook and sell food late into the night in South Korea. Created by
Photo credit: Yelp
The new Hanshin Pocha Space was one of the locations of Bowl’d BBQ, a small Korean BBQ chain in the East Bay. Sensing a great need for a late-night Korean restaurant, the owner transformed Bowl’d BBQ into He Hanshin Pocha and loves the results so far. Manager John Lee told The Chronicle, “Weekend nights are often packed with undergraduates, graduate students and young professionals, and the last call is often at 2am.”
Diners are already enjoying the chain’s best-selling dish, the spicy chicken feet. This requires gloves to eat from a hot cast iron pan, even DIY rice balls. You can roll your own ingredients such as dried seaweed to make a rice ball. You can also feel like a street vendor when you order the Hanshin tongdak, which the chef cuts his whole chicken fried right in front of your table. When it comes to seafood, chewy tteokbokki is one of his favorites. Tteokbokki is rice cake topped with seafood, and there is also the option of grilling a whole squid. “It’s full of umami. There are a lot of spicy foods. It goes really well with Korean soju,” Lee told Chronicle.
Along with the soju, you can also wash down the dish with several types of milky Korean rice wine, makgeolli and, of course, Korean beer.
Photo courtesy of: Hanshin Pocha
There are rumors about Baek Jong-won, creator of Hanshin Pocha, that he will expand more Bay Area locations if the Temescal spot does well. He opened his first Hanshin Pocha store in South Korea in 1998 and has two of his stores in the United States in Los Angeles and one in Mesa, Arizona. According to SFGate, Jongwon has “appeared in Korean TV shows such as ‘Pike Jongwon’s Food Truck’ and ‘Pike Jongwon’s Top 3 Chef King’.” Silicon He has two locations in the Valley and one in San Francisco.
Hanshin Pocha is available at Temescal Monday through Wednesday from 5pm to 1am, Thursday through Saturday from 5pm to 2am, and Sunday from 4pm to midnight.