20 Years of Korean Restaurants in Singapore, and the One I Ran Into the Ground

I’ve been living in Singapore for close to 20 years now. When I think back to when I first got here, it honestly feels like a different planet compared to now. Back then, there were exactly two Korean restaurants in the whole city. Daejanggeum, and one place tucked inside Tanjong Pagar International Building. That was it. If you wanted a bowl of kimchi jjigae, you had to go to one of those two, and if either one happened to be closed that day, well, that was just your no-Korean-food week.

Looking back it’s almost funny, but at the time it was completely normal. If you said “Korean food” to a Singaporean, most people would just tilt their head. You’d have to explain what kimchi even was. Grilling pork belly at the table was some exotic novelty. Now you walk down Orchard Road and see Korean restaurant signs one after another, and it’s not unusual for a young Singaporean friend to turn around and recommend a tteokbokki place to me. Back then, that would’ve been unthinkable.

I opened a Korean restaurant too. And it failed.

Alright, confession time. I opened a Korean restaurant of my own back in those days. Looking back, my timing was about as bad as it could get. I started way too early. The market simply wasn’t ready, and I was the only one who hadn’t gotten the memo. Awareness of Korean food was low, sourcing ingredients wasn’t nearly as easy as it is now, and honestly the whole category of “Korean food” barely registered on Singapore’s dining scene. These days everyone knows what Korean fried chicken or K-BBQ means. Back then, those phrases didn’t even exist yet.

It didn’t last more than a couple of years before I had to shut it down. It was rough. I lost money, took a hit to my pride, and spent a long time asking myself what I’d done wrong. Was it the menu? The location? The marketing? I turned it over in my head a hundred different ways. But looking back now, the answer was simple: I was too early. I jumped in before the market had opened up, and I learned the hard way that it doesn’t matter how good your execution is if the timing is off.

And then, out of nowhere, K everything exploded

Then, within just a few years, the whole atmosphere shifted, fast. K-pop started taking over the world, and right behind it came K-dramas, K-movies, and K-food, all fusing into one giant cultural wave. Singapore was no exception. Korean restaurants started popping up everywhere, and now almost every mall has at least one. Korean BBQ joints, fried chicken shops, bunsik places, even Korean bakeries. It used to take real effort to track down a single Korean restaurant. Now it’s the opposite problem, there are so many that deciding where to eat has become the hard part.

Honestly, it’s a mixed feeling. Part of me is genuinely happy. The food I once tried so hard to introduce is now just part of everyday life here. But another part of me can’t help thinking, “if only I’d started a few years later.” The restaurants opening now get to launch into a market that already knows and wants Korean food, they skip the whole uphill battle I had to fight from zero. Timing really is that brutal.

Turns out failure is an asset too

For a while after the restaurant closed, I just wanted to forget the whole thing ever happened. But over time my thinking shifted. All those failures, all that trial and error, what I misjudged, where the money leaked out, why that location didn’t work, what was wrong with the menu, I’ve been writing it all down and organizing it piece by piece. Looking at it now, it’s actually turned into something valuable. Half the mistakes anyone opening a Korean restaurant in Singapore today will make, I already made them first.

So if you’re someone thinking about opening a Korean restaurant, or getting into Korean F&B here in Singapore, or if you’re considering investing in this space, feel free to reach out. I’m no expert, but I can absolutely hand you a solid list of “here’s exactly how to fail.” Learning from someone else’s mistakes has to be the cheapest tuition there is.

It still gives me a strange feeling seeing how big the Korean food scene has gotten here. Feels like it was just yesterday I was choosing between Daejanggeum and that one restaurant in Tanjong Pagar, because those were literally the only two options I had.