When Jun Park moved to Atlanta from Korea as an 8-year-old, he often eschewed the Korean rice cakes, stews and braised meat dishes he grew up with in favor of the burgers and pizza popular in his new home country. But he never forgot the time he spent in the kitchen with his mother, grandmother and aunts in Korea.
His love of both American and Korean cuisines made him a perfect partner for Jess Kim, who tapped Park in 2022 when she decided she wanted to launch a pop-up with a menu of Korean and fusion street food.
Ganji (instagram.com/ganji.atl) has since popped up at breweries around metro Atlanta, and recently completed a residency at the Punk Foodie stall in Ponce City Market. The concept’s name is a nod to a Korean slang phrase that means “brash but vibrant, like the dishes we create,” Kim said.
Credit: Courtesy of of Ganji
Credit: Courtesy of of Ganji
“I wanted to touch on my cultural background, because it was a cuisine I never cooked professionally,” said Kim, who is of Korean heritage but was born in New York and largely grew up in Gwinnett County. “I wanted to introduce Korean food a little differently, in a way that’s familiar and approachable.
The pair met a decade ago, when Park was in high school and started a job as a prep cook at Seed Kitchen and Bar in Marietta, where Kim served as lead line cook. They kept in touch over the years as they moved into new jobs at local restaurants. Park spent time at the Chastain and Gunshow while Kim worked at Umi and Cooks & Soldiers.
In her youth, Kim mostly ate Korean food prepared by her parents at home but would often experiment with cooking non-Korean dishes for herself. Ganji marks the first time as an adult she’s fully thrown herself into the cuisine of her childhood “and connected to (her) cultural background,” she said.
Credit: Courtesy of of Ganji
Credit: Courtesy of of Ganji
When they first started out, Kim and Park would meet up days in advance of their pop-ups, brainstorming for hours on dishes and making long shopping lists for their trips to international grocery stores on Buford Highway. But along the way “something clicked,” Park said, with the duo developing a shorthand that requires minimal recipe development, aided by Kim’s experience curating menus in her former restaurant jobs.
“Our menu is a perfect representation of the food we grew up eating as Korean-Americans,” Park said. “You can ask every Korean child growing up what their favorite food was, and it wasn’t Korean food. But of course we still ate a lot of Korean food. That’s where Jess and I really found a balance of what we’re serving.”
Though menu items change from pop-up to pop-up, customer favorites — all of which made the menu during Ganji’s tenure at Punk Foodie at Ponce City Market — include the Ganji burger with American cheese and kimchi relish; shrimp katsu sando with a panko shrimp patty, cabbage and yuzu tartar sauce; and cacio e pepe tteokbokki, which sees Korean rice cakes tossed with an Italian sauce made of Pecorino cheese and black pepper.
Credit: Courtesy of of Ganji
Credit: Courtesy of of Ganji
But Kim’s favorite Ganji dish is the yuzu pepper wet wings, an ode to Atlanta’s famous lemon pepper wet variety.
Park and Kim plan to pop up next at Sceptre Brewing in Oakhurst, and hope to start a residency at a forthcoming distillery in Chamblee. While the weather is still cold, they plan to add some soups and other new items to the menu.
Though they hope to one day open Ganji as a brick-and-mortar restaurant, “we don’t think about it too much,” Kim said. “We want to give ourselves time to build a strong and healthy foundation before we even go down that road. Doing a pop-up is a way for us to test the waters without taking too much of a risk.”
Ganji, instagram.com/ganji.atl/.
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