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After Peter Serpico closed his eponymous restaurant at the start of the pandemic, it sat empty for a long time. The style of elegant, seasonal, personal food that was being served at Serpico didn’t seem to make sense in a takeout setting. Then, in October 2020, the team at Serpico introduced a new concept.
Pete’s Place was a takeout-only concept, a ghost kitchen that operated out of Serpico’s long-empty kitchen. The entire menu, which included comforting, crave-able dishes like Korean fried chicken, beef and radish soup, pickled pepper ramen and spicy chicken stew, was designed not just to survive delivery, but to possibly improve while they sat in their to-go containers.
The idea was one that Serpico, along with restaurateur Stephen Starr, had been thinking about for a while. In 2017, they announced that they’d be opening a second concept, one that would pull from Serpico’s Korean background, but the idea had progressed slowly. The pandemic shifted things, giving them an opportunity to try the idea before fully launching it. And launch they did. Earlier this year, Serpico and Starr opened KPod, a restaurant inside a former Starr restaurant space that had been semi-renovated from its early 2000s glory into something a little more modern.
KPod couldn’t be more different from Serpico. It’s much more casual, with dishes like honey butter fries, shrimp cocktail with kimchi cocktail sauce, a whole fried chicken, and a selection of hand-rolls loaded with fatty tuna belly and crispy shrimp. It’s all the way across town in University City, where the audience is completely different. It’s also family friendly.
“My daughter loves the food,” Serpico says. “All the people who have been around [Starr Restaurants] for a long time, they all have kids, and it’s like their kids’ favourite. And I feel better about that than literally anything else.”
Serpico’s professional shift during the pandemic mirrors the experience of many other chefs, who spent the pandemic taking a step back and thinking about what they wanted. Katianna and John Hong made the decision before Covid to relocate to Southern California with their daughter. The restaurant they planned, called Yangban Society, was a major departure from their earlier careers, where they’d made names for themselves at the Restaurant at Meadowood, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Napa Valley.
“When John and I started out, we both had this passion for wanting to be the best,” Katianna said. “And that’s what Michelin meant – it meant you were the best. But as we were ideating about what we wanted our own place to be, we knew that we wanted to do something that was truly authentic to us and our experiences growing up Asian American.”
Yangban Society is part deli, part restaurant, a celebration of Katianna and John’s childhoods in New York and Chicago respectively. Rather than trying to apply the type of cooking they were doing at the Meadowood to their Korean cooking traditions, Yangban Society is more casual, more flexible based on the experience a guest is looking for, and more in line with how the Hongs live and eat these days.
“I think our interest in doing something a little different started with the fact that we were thinking about starting a family,” Katianna said. “If we're going to be spending time away from her [their daughter], we wanted to be doing something that we feel is important, that we feel proud of.”
For the Hongs, being deeply embedded in their community was a key element of building Yangban Society. The ability to provide good jobs and a place for connection where they lived has been a major driving force in building the business. For Brady Williams, who also made a name for himself at a destination restaurant, community was an important element as he struck out on his own.
Williams became executive chef at Seattle’s Canlis restaurant in 2015, remaining there until early 2021. During his tenure, he won a James Beard award for Best Chef: Northwest and was named one of Food & Wine Magazine’s Best New Chefs. The opportunity to lead such an iconic restaurant, Williams says, taught him a lot about what he wanted in his own business. When he left in February of 2021, he says, he knew he wanted to build something that would connect him to people.
The resulting restaurant - named Tomo after Williams’ grandmother - was in part inspired by the many pivots that Canlis made during the pandemic – things like running a crab shack, a burger takeout spot, and a summer camp-themed experience. More than anything, though, he wanted to build a place that people would return to.
“I really wanted to be in a neighbourhood that I felt connected to, a neighbourhood that I spend time in where I could be a part of the fabric of the community,” Williams said. “I think that was a lesson in the pandemic, that restaurants that remained accessible to their city or neighbourhood did a little bit better, and so that was important to me.”
The food at Kpod, Tomo and Yangban Society may be more casual than what these chefs were cooking in the before times, but it’s no less special. It’s more personal, more deeply connected to the lives of the people cooking it, and therefore more distinctive. And it’s very, very delicious.
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