Popular South Korean restaurant Hojokban, which made waves when it opened in New York City in 2023, is coming to Los Angeles’s Arts District in early 2025 at 734 East Third Street. The restaurant is best known for riffing on traditional Korean dishes and playfully plating them for sharing on social media, including a TikTok-viral Shin Ramyun-topped fried rice, honey Korean fried chicken, and sliced garlic pork jowl. Hojokban’s signature offering — juicy sous vide-cooked short rib flavored like grilled galbi — is served with its bone and an arugula salad.

While the New York City outpost is operated in partnership with Hand Hospitality, a prolific and influential Korean-owned restaurant group affiliated with Atoboy, Jua, and Lysée, the Seoul-based GFFG Hospitality will be running Hojokban in Los Angeles. Hojokban recently popped up at Melody in Virgil Village to drum up interest for the forthcoming restaurant. The wine bar was filled with a mix of young Korean Americans and other Angelenos taking in cold perilla oil noodle salads and strawberry-flavored hamachi crudo.

Hojokban arrives in Los Angeles at a time when modern Korean food is transforming from a novelty into a bona fide segment of the local dining scene. Early practitioners of the genre include chefs Roy Choi’s Pot and Kwang Uh’s first installment of Baroo, along with Koreatown’s now-closed Hanchic, Kinn, and Tokki serving new-school takes on Korean dishes. Today, places like finer dining Korean spot Yangban, energetic Korean drinking food establishment Danbi, and the latest iteration of Baroo serve elevated takes on Korean flavors. In Victor Heights, chef Jihee Lee’s Perilla prepares seasonally-driven Korean snack fare like gimbap. Korean cuisine in Los Angeles has always been dominated by classic mom-and-pop restaurants serving traditional banchan and prepared dishes.

Hojokban

Hojokban

Hojokban, which refers to a traditional Korean wooden table, looks to serve polished versions of familiar plates. Menu mainstays include a truffle-laden gamja jeon (potato pancake) presented like fancy nachos around a ramekin of truffle mayonnaise; buckwheat noodles tossed in perilla oil; tuna gimbap seasoned with tobiko fish roe; and well-diced yukhoe (beef tartare) flavored with sweet soy sauce and nori aioli and served with fried lotus root chips.

The building on East Third Street will house another GFFG Hospitality concept called Knotted, a cream-filled doughnut shop with 16 locations in South Korea. The pink-and-yellow-themed shop served over 11 million doughnuts in 2022 and presents its colorful fritters inside illuminated glass pastry cases. Knotted will open around the same time as Hojokban in 2025.

Director of brand strategy, Amber Koh, will head operations for Hojokban and Knotted in Los Angeles. She tells Eater that GFFG Hospitality looked for years to find the ideal location before landing in the Arts District next to Michelin-starred omakase restaurant 715 Sushi. (The restaurant group felt that opening in Koreatown would be fraught with unfair comparisons to the traditional mom-and-pops that already serve superlative food.) Hojokban looks to appeal to Korean Americans and non-Koreans alike while staying rooted to classic flavors — ones that Angelenos know and recognize.

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