Seattle’s Trendy Korean Restaurant Paju Has Reopened in a New Location

You would argue that Paju didn’t actually need an improve. The modern Korean restaurant has been bringing in raves because it opened in its authentic Queen Anne location in 2019. That’s the yr the Seattle Instances known as its meals “exactingly conceived, superbly composed and dizzyingly scrumptious.” A pair years later it made the New York Instances, which known as its dishes “elegant and expressive” in a listing of thrilling eating places across the nation. The Infatuation has equally sang Paju’s praises, with a 2022 assessment that gushed “Paju’s meals makes us really feel like we’re residing in a rustic ballad — abruptly, it’s simple to like once more, the whole lot pairs properly with a chilly beer, and we are able to’t assist however get emotional over the small particulars.”

So why did proprietor Invoice Jeong resolve to alter issues up in a significant method, transferring the restaurant to a brand new location in South Lake Union, almost doubling the dimensions of his employees, and making main alterations to the menu?

In a phrase: area. Paju outgrew the confines of its authentic restaurant virtually as quickly because it opened. Even that rapturous Seattle Instances assessment famous the “small kitchen” and the “shoebox-shaped” eating room that caught a few of the smoke from the range because of a sub-par air flow system.

However the primary drawback might need been that Paju actually couldn’t make sufficient meals to maintain up with demand. “Our previous location was 930 sq. toes,” Jeong says. “Our largest challenge each single day was operating out of product. We didn’t have sufficient fridge models to maintain it in.”

The “second technology” of Paju, as Jeong calls it, is now open at 513 Westlake Avenue, the previous house of Josh Henderson’s Vestal, which specialised in wood-fired cooking. Jeong and his workforce are inheriting that wood-fired grill, together with a combi oven and a convection oven — Paju’s cooks received’t must work solely on a gasoline range. “There was so much [Henderson] did with this area, however he simply couldn’t make it work,” Jeong says.

Jen Tolle

The brand new toys will permit the Paju workforce to develop the menu with dishes like a wood-roasted cauliflower served with a mint sauce and a dry-aged ribeye — dry-aging meat being one other course of that Jeong beforehand didn’t have the area for. There might be a full bar on the new location too, with an Asian-influenced cocktail checklist that features a sesame martini and a drink merely known as Boba that has boba in it, positive to be a polarizing alternative. (Staying on the menu is the squid ink fried rice topped with a smoked quail egg, probably the most well-known and Instagram-ready dish Paju serves.)

With the intention to make all of this work, Jeong has needed to employees up from a workforce of 10 workers to 17. All of those modifications and new faces, mixed with the brand new area, have made this reopening of Paju really feel just like the opening of a model new restaurant, with all of the stress that that entails.

“Each restaurant has like three months of simply discovering their bearings,” he says. “We’re simply doing our very best. So as an alternative of spending three months making an attempt to get the appropriate bearings we are going to we’ll have our correct bearings by like one month. It’s a rising ache, but it surely’s gonna be loads of ache in a brief period of time — hopefully.”

Paju, at 513 Westlake Avenue, is open from 4 to 9 p.m. Monday via Thursday and till 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. There’s a parking storage simply off Republican Avenue.