One Block of Seoul: How 32nd Street Became Koreatown

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3 a.m. on West 32nd Street

At three in the morning, most of Midtown has gone dark. The office towers are empty, the Empire State Building's spire glows over streets with no one on them, and the delis have pulled their gates halfway down.

Then you turn onto West 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and the lights are still on.

Steam rolls out of a doorway when it opens. A table of nurses just off a night shift splits a pot of bubbling stew. Upstairs, someone is finishing a karaoke song that should have ended an hour ago. A line of twenty-somethings waits outside a barbecue place, phones glowing, in no hurry at all. Even now, a few places on this block never close at all.

Tourists photograph the Hangul signs (Hangul is the Korean alphabet, created in the 15th century under King Sejong) stacked five stories high and assume this is how it always was. It was not. Fifty years ago, nobody wanted to be on this block. Forty years ago, a restaurant here had almost no competition. The story of how a stretch of garment-district sidewalk became "One Block of Seoul" is really a story about who came to New York, what they sold, what they ate, and where they went home to at night.

To tell it properly, though, we have to start further back, and further west, with the first Asian kitchen in America.

Before Koreatown: How Asian Food Landed in America

The first Asian restaurant in America opened in a gold rush. In 1849, merchants from Canton in southern China heard the same rumors of gold that were pulling East Coast fortune hunters to California. Some 25,000 Chinese arrived in California between 1849 and 1851, and many of them went into business feeding the miners rather than digging. On November 19, 1849, three hundred Chinese gathered at the Canton Restaurant in San Francisco, which historians count as the first Chinese restaurant in North America.

The food traveled east the hard way. As the gold ran out, anti-Chinese violence spread across the West, and Chinese cooks moved toward New York. The railroads Chinese laborers had built carried their restaurants with them.

In New York, at first, almost nobody outside Chinatown would eat there. What changed that was a dish: chop suey, a stir-fried tumble of meat and vegetables whose name roughly means "odds and ends." Around the turn of the century, bohemian New Yorkers discovered it, then everyone did. By the 1930s, the Depression made a cheap plate of chop suey even more attractive, and by the 1940s nearly every restaurant in Manhattan's Chinatown hung a "Chop Suey" or "Chow Mein" sign over its door. Americans would not get a real taste of regional Chinese cooking, Szechuan and Hunan especially, until the 1960s and 1970s.

Japanese food arrived as a show. For decades, "Japanese food" to most Americans meant one thing, sukiyaki. Then, in 1964, a former Olympic wrestler named Rocky Aoki opened Benihana on West 56th Street, a few blocks from the theater district. Chefs cooked on steel grills right at the table, which almost no American had ever seen. In the first months, the restaurant served one or two customers a day, and family members took jobs at other restaurants to pay the bills. Within a few years, Aoki was turning people away. Two years later, in 1966, Los Angeles got what is often called the country's first true sushi bar, Kawafuku.

Korean food came last of the three, and for a simple reason: until 1965, there were very few Koreans in America to cook it.

Asian Food in Manhattan Today, and Who Lives Where

A century and a half after the Canton Restaurant, Asian kitchens are everywhere in Manhattan. The city's health inspection records list 10,575 restaurants, cafés and food businesses on the island, and the four largest Asian cuisines alone account for more than 1,400 of them. Japanese (552) and Chinese (532) together outnumber all the Italian restaurants and pizzerias combined.


Korean food sits third among Asian cuisines, with 179 places. What makes it unusual is not the count but the clustering. Ninety-five of those 179 restaurants, more than half, sit inside a single city planning district called simply "Midtown," which is where Koreatown is. Korean food is about three times as concentrated there as it is across Manhattan as a whole. Chinese food, by comparison, is spread across the island, with Chinatown as only its densest pocket.

Now look at where Asian New Yorkers actually live. About 1.38 million New Yorkers are Asian, roughly one in six residents, and the community keeps growing and dispersing. Chinese New Yorkers are by far the largest group, followed by Indians, then Filipino, Bangladeshi and Korean New Yorkers at around 100,000 each.


Here is the twist. The densest block of Korean restaurants in America's largest city is in Manhattan, but most Korean New Yorkers are not. The three council districts with the most Korean residents are all in Queens, covering Flushing, Bayside and Whitestone. By the Asian American Federation's district figures, more than half of the city's Koreans live in Queens and only about one in five in Manhattan. Even Manhattan's Chinatown, the oldest Asian neighborhood in the city, has been slowly losing residents as younger families move out to Queens and Brooklyn.

So the most famous Korean street in New York is not where Korean New Yorkers live. To understand why, you have to go back to 1965.

1965: The Door Opens, and the Wholesalers Come First

In 1965, Congress rewrote the country's immigration law and scrapped the old national-origin quotas that had kept most Asians out for decades. Korean immigration, a trickle before, became a steady stream through the 1970s and 1980s.

The surprising part is what the newcomers opened first. It was not restaurants. It was wholesale. In the blocks of Midtown between roughly 24th and 34th Streets, from Fifth to Sixth Avenue, Korean importers set up showrooms selling wigs and general merchandise to shops across the country. The location made sense: this was the edge of the Garment District, cheap by Manhattan standards and close to Penn Station and the highways.

Other Korean New Yorkers went into the businesses that run all night. Korean families famously came to dominate the city's late-night greengrocers and delis, the shops that stay open while the rest of the city sleeps.

All of those people needed somewhere to eat, read a newspaper in their own language, and find each other. The first anchor on 32nd Street was a bookstore. Its founder, Choi Eung-pyo, loved books and started by bringing them over from Korea and lending them out of his home in Flushing, Queens. When demand outgrew his house, he opened Koryo Books on 32nd Street at the end of the 1970s, when almost no other Korean business was on the block. In its early days, the shop took in about $30 a day. It is still there today, now under its second owner, with K-pop albums sharing the shelves with Korean novels. Restaurants followed. New York Kom Tang Kalbi House, at 32 West 32nd Street, traced its opening to 1979 and claimed to be the first Korean restaurant on the block. It grilled short ribs over wood chips and served gomtang, a milky, long-simmered beef soup, and for years it stayed open around the clock. Kom Tang is gone now, and The Kunjip occupies its old address.

Nobody planned Koreatown. There was no city program, no developer, no grand design. It grew out of a lunch problem.

The Block Nobody Wanted

If the rents on 32nd Street were cheap, there was a reason, and it stood on the corner of Broadway.

The Martinique was a grand French Renaissance hotel from the turn of the century, designed by the same architect behind the Plaza and the Dakota. By the 1980s it had become one of the city's most notorious welfare hotels, where the city housed homeless families in crowded rooms. New Yorkers walked around the block rather than through it. According to sociologist Jinwon Kim, who has studied Koreatown for years, the hotel's presence made it hard for any business to settle on the street.

The Korean shopkeepers settled anyway. A spot nobody else wanted was a spot they could afford, and their customers were other Koreans who were coming for the food and the language, not the scenery.

In 1989 the Martinique closed. With it went the street's worst reputation, and the block started to fill. The signs had been there for a few years: the Stanford Hotel opened on the street in 1986, and optometrists' offices and beauty salons soon followed. The cheap block was about to stop being cheap.

The Lights That Never Go Off

In 1983, a restaurant called Kang Suh opened at the corner of 32nd and Broadway, in the Martinique's shadow. At the time it had exactly one Korean competitor on the block.

Kang Suh never closed. Not at midnight, not at four in the morning, not on holidays. It served barbecue, stews and, eventually, sushi, around the clock.

The likeliest reason was the customers. The people who built Koreatown kept strange hours. Deli and grocery owners locked up long after midnight. Wholesalers worked late on shipments. A Korean family that ran an all-night store in Queens or the Bronx could not eat dinner at seven. A restaurant that stayed open was not a gimmick; it was the only kind of restaurant that fit their lives.

The habit stuck long after the customers changed. Kang Suh has since closed, but its idea did not. The pandemic, though, cut it short for many. Plenty of Koreatown kitchens that once ran all night now close somewhere between midnight and 5 a.m. But a handful, such as Miss Korea BBQ and the soup house Gammeeok, still keep the lights on around the clock, and the block remains Manhattan's most reliable place to eat after 2 a.m. That is why it was still bright in the opening scene. The all-night soup bowl that once fed shopkeepers now feeds nurses, bartenders, line cooks, club crowds and tourists whose body clocks are still on Seoul time.

A Name on the Street Sign

By the 1990s, the stretch of 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was Korean in everything but name. In 1995 it got the name too: the city designated the block "Korea Way."

A street name sounds like a small thing. It is not. It meant the city now saw the block the way Korean New Yorkers already did, as a place with its own identity rather than a forgotten corner of the Garment District. In 2007, colorful "Korea Way" banners went up on the street poles running from West 25th to 32nd Street.

The buildings grew upward instead of outward. Because one short block had to hold everything, restaurants, karaoke rooms, bakeries, salons and spas stacked themselves floor by floor, with independent businesses climbing to the upper floors. Today the New York City Korean Chamber of Commerce counts more than 100 small businesses on that single block. Walk it at night and look up: the vertical wall of Hangul signs is the closest thing in New York to a street in Seoul.

From Hidden World to Tourist Stop

For most of its life, Koreatown was what Jinwon Kim calls a "hidden world." Non-Asian New Yorkers walked past it on the way to Macy's or Madison Square Garden without stepping inside. The customers were mostly Korean immigrants and their families.

Then Korea itself became a global brand. K-pop filled stadiums. Korean films and series won Oscars and topped streaming charts. Korean barbecue, fried chicken and soju became things Americans actively wanted, not just tolerated. The hidden block turned into a destination, and the line outside the barbecue places started to look like the line outside a Broadway show.

Success came at a price, and the people who paid it were the ones who started everything. As rents on and around 32nd Street climbed, the Korean wholesalers who gave Koreatown its reason to exist moved out to Queens and New Jersey. Koreatown itself kept spreading east, along East 32nd Street toward Madison and Park Avenues. Japanese restaurants moved in too. In 2022, the neighborhood launched an annual Korean Pride Festival that has grown each year since.

The block that once fed wig importers at lunch now feeds the world.

A Town Nobody Lives In

Here is the strangest fact about Manhattan's Koreatown: almost nobody lives there.

Most ethnic neighborhoods begin as places where people live, and the restaurants come to feed them. Chinatown, Little Italy and Flushing all started that way. Koreatown ran the story in reverse. It began as a place to work and eat, and it never became a place to sleep. The Korean New Yorkers who eat on 32nd Street go home to Flushing, Bayside, Fort Lee and Palisades Park.

In her 2026 book Koreatown, NYC: The Consumption of a Transnational Brand, Jinwon Kim gives this a name: a "transclave." It is an ethnic enclave that exists for consumption, leisure and entertainment, shaped as much by Seoul's consumer culture and Korea's national branding as by the immigrants who first built it. Koreatown is less a neighborhood than a stage where New York comes to taste Seoul.

That may be exactly why the next chapter is happening somewhere else. Korean food no longer needs one block to exist in Manhattan. The hot stone pots, sizzling platters and crisp pancakes that once required a trip to 32nd Street are turning up across Manhattan, including the long restaurant row of Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen. There, UT47 Kitchen & Bar at 683 Ninth Avenue has just added a Korean dinner menu of bubbling stews, sizzling bulgogi and LA galbi, alongside a full plant-based Korean menu, not far from where Benihana first fired up its grills in 1964.

The story of the block is finished, for now. The story of the food is just starting. Why is LA galbi called "LA"? Why does a Korean stew have ham in it? That is the next post.

Sources

Koryo Books: Koryo Books: Where K-Pop Fans and Book Lovers Converge in NYC (Untapped New York)

Kom Tang: New York Kom Tang Kalbi House (Time Out), 32nd Street: A New York Songline, The Koreans in Koreatown, Manhattan (Atlas of Home)

Late-night hours today: Best Late-Night Restaurants in NYC (Stage & Street NYC) and Where to Eat After 2am in NYC (FKA)

Location: New York, NY, USA

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