For a restaurant, a name is serious business—sometimes a signal of an owner’s vision or personal history, sometimes a play on the fare it serves, and always a marker of how it will be known in the city to which it belongs.
That’s why, when Daniel Kramer, co-owner of Duke’s Grocery, couldn’t decide on what to call his new Korean barbecue restaurant, he enlisted some help. A group of his friends and industry colleagues gathered at The Lemon Collective, passed around Korean beer and soju and Timber pizza, and brainstormed until Gogi Yogi was born.
“I basically locked the door and said we’re not leaving until we have a name,” Kramer says. “Eat, drink, and let the creative juices flow. We liked that what we came up with was fun and playful and a little entendre.”
The 75-seat restaurant, which opened last week at the corner of 8th Street and Florida Avenue in Shaw, is christened with two Korean words, translating to “meat here.” Gogi Yogi is the first permanent KBBQ addition—tabletop grills for do-it-yourself cooking and all—in D.C. proper, a big driver behind why, after two Duke’s locations and a spinoff Duke’s Counter, Kramer chose to deviate from another burger spot.
While he has no Korean roots of his own, he grew up near Koreatown in Los Angeles and has fond memories of eating out at the area’s restaurants. He was tired of driving a minimum of 30 minutes to the closest Korean barbecue restaurants in Maryland or Virginia.
It’s a “familiar and ubiquitous cuisine,” he says, whether you’re from Chicago or New York or Tampa or Savannah, Georgia. “It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. We [in D.C.] have every major and not-so-major type of cuisine, and we just felt like this was missing.”
Gogi Yogi is the latest in what’s been something of a revolving door of tenants for the high-end Shay apartment building. Women’s clothing boutique Argent was the previous business at the space, which itself replaced another expensive clothing boutique, Kit + Ace. In addition to a handful of high-end menswear purveyors, a few food and beverage businesses have also folded at The Shay, including Glen’s Garden Market and Kyirisan. In the food world, Gogi Yogi now joins Compass Coffee, Nicecream, Cava, and Union Kitchen Grocery at the JBG Smith development.
To bring a well-loved BBQ tradition inside the Beltway, Kramer asked Patrice Cunningham, a chef who mostly recently hosted intimate Korean barbecue pop-up dinners out of her home, to take charge of the kitchen. Cunningham grew up cooking with her Korean mother and created a menu for Gogi Yogi that blends both her D.C. childhood and more traditional recipes she learned from her mom.
“I have no right words to express how grateful and honored to have this opportunity and especially bring something that I enjoy so much to the public,” Cunningham wrote in an Instagram post in June, before the opening. “I will be focusing on building a fun and exciting menu and a service-oriented team to fully execute this wonderful experience.”
Opening a restaurant with tabletop grills is no small feat. Between permits and fire suppression and ventilation and down-draft systems (so patrons don’t leave smelling like smoke), the time and investment is more complicated than an average restaurant. Each table is equipped with its own cooking station for an experience the team hopes will be social and interactive.
Gogi Yogi has plenty of standard KBBQ offerings—including the staple marinated meats and complimentary side dishes—but Kramer is clear that they’re not going for strict imitation of the traditional experience. Many appetizers are available to go, like the double-fried chicken wings, onion rings paired with spicy gochujang sauce, dumplings, and “hangover soup” thick with ribeye.
The meats for the grill are meant to share, whether it’s gochujang-spiced baby octopus ($21) or bulgogi ($23) or tail-on tiger shrimp ($27), or Creekstone Farms’ dry-age strip steak ($39). Diners can cook the meat themselves over personal tabletop grills, or servers can step in and do the turning. Complimentary cold salads are also included. And unlike at other KBBQ spots, there isn’t an all-you-can-eat option. Depending what you order, price point is a few dollars more than you’d find at spots like Honey Pig or Hwa Gae Jang Tuh—likely due to the location and fancier cuts of meat.
Drink pairings are also meant to share and “provide a different way to work on your biceps,” says Kramer. Bottles of the Korean distilled liquor soju are available in six fruit flavors for the table ($20-35). So-maek beer towers, featuring a pilsner and soju mix, would last a full meal ($65-$85). For single drinks, there’s plenty of Korean beer cans and cocktails that incorporate Korean ingredients: a lighter yuzu fruit liqueur and vodka mix, a bourbon base topped off with jujube marmalade, or a mule with the Korean distilled liquor soju and ginger-chili syrup.
And guests won’t find themselves struggling with bottle tops—both the meat shears on every table and the grill switchers servers use have built-in bottle openers.
Reservations are a good idea for groups of four or more, but there’s space for walk-ins. A wrap-around patio stretching from Florida to 8th—serving food and drinks, minus the grilled meats experience—will provide more room in the coming months.
For the interior, architecture firm Studio 3877 wrapped the high-ceiled concrete space in corrugated metal and neon lights, then gave free rein of the walls to KeyHan Lee, a Korean-American artist from Fairfax. Lee painted floor-to-ceiling murals inspired by Korean comic book pages. The stools at every table, which look like giant metal spools, open to store belongings during a meal.
“Some of the places we went to in L.A. had been there 50 years, and the tables are Formica and the walls have nothing on them except stains,” says Kramer. “Some places are brand new—K-pop, TVs, bright neon. This is neither of those. We just want to make it friendly, fun, and cool.”
Gogi Yogi is located at 1921 8th Street NW in Shaw. Open Sunday-Thursday 11 a.m.-1:30 a.m. and Friday-Saturday 11 a.m.-2:30 a.m. Kitchen currently closes at 11 p.m.
