In Incheon, a "Korean-American" restaurant from a chef who has never been to America

And other bites from outside of Seoul

If you look up towards the 2nd floor of Lotte Mall in Songdo, Incheon, you’ll see a classic Coca-Cola logo attached to a sign in English that says “Korean Restaurant. We took the motif of Korea Town in LA in the 1990s”.

Inside, the tablecloths are checkered red and white. On the wall, there are portraits of Michael Jackson and Chan Ho Park, the first South Korean to play in the MLB. Photos of Los Angeles decorate the walls—but the owner Jihyung Yu has never been to LA.

“I want customers to feel like they’re stepping into a little piece of LA—maybe even a version of LA that only exists in my imagination,” he told me.

The name of the restaurant, Nasung, is a Sino-Korean nickname for Los Angeles. “It’s a term used by the older generations,” Jihyung said. “There’s even a song called ‘When you go to Nasung’.” (Nasung is a shortened version of the Chinese name for Los Angeles, re-interpreted with Korean pronunciation, as explained on Reddit). Jihyung opened the place 2 years ago, after learning how to cook while working at a franchise chicken shop.

His LA Style Chicken Plate is an homage to his roots in the chicken shop: Chicken tenders and fries are topped with a sweet and spicy sauce, then served with a scoop of potato salad. On my first visit, I kept ordering this plate as soon as it was finished. Apparently, it caused a confusion in the kitchen, as our table of foreigners ordered chicken plate after chicken plate.

“Just keep making it,” Jihyung told his team. Since then, he’s stopped breading the chicken tenders himself, since it’s too time-consuming for the volume he handles. It’s still a delicious plate of food, but I wish he’d kept the original recipe.

But there are 2 more unique dishes that I can’t get out of my head at Nasung. The first is deep fried corn. Jihyung lightly batters and deep-fries canned corn, then hits it with Korean “cheesling” seasoning. Topped with parmesan, it’s crispy on the outside, sweet in the middle, and coated with the sort of umami-packed dust you might find in a bag of chips.

The second dish is a cheese omelette with demi-glace. The omelette is jumbo-sized and soft in the middle, like a Japanese omelette, but Jihyung never learned how to make this dish while working at the fried chicken joint.

“At first, I wanted to make rolled omelets, but I just couldn’t figure it out. So I tried making regular omelets instead—and they turned out really pretty,” he said. “I thought, maybe I have a knack for this. And it became a menu item.”

The demiglace for the omelette is Heinz demiglace, spiked with honey and tomato sauce. It gets topped with parmesan and tomatoes with basil. The omelette absolutely melts into the sauce, and each bite is rich and a bit sweet. It’s delicious, unpretentious, and something that I have never encountered in Los Angeles.

“My motto is that Nasung is just a place for delicious food,” Jihyung told me. “That’s it.”

📍 Nasung Sikdang (Naver Link) (Google Maps)

Incheon is South Korea’s 3rd largest city. Below I’ve written about 2 more spots outside of Seoul that I think are worth a visit, including omakase in an unlikely place.