Today we’d like to introduce you to Peter Chung & Sean Chang.
Hi Peter and Sean, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
The idea originally started as a joke between two friends in college. We were living in a 2-bedroom apartment at the time and were just messing around with different recipes. One day Sean made fried chicken with Korean influences and it was so good that we joked “we should open a restaurant for this!”. As more and more of our friends came over and tried it, they too thought it would be a good idea. Slowly things became more and more serious and we began discussing it in length for months–after we both graduated, we had the good fortune to come across the opportunity to actually open and finance the restaurant, so we went for it
It is also very crucial to note that prior to this “apartment experiment” Sean was injured in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. He was planning to enter the restaurant industry as a chef and had many opportunities lined up, but all of these were turned down or revoked after his injury because he was no longer physically able to work in a professional kitchen. However, he did not let this stop him from pursuing his passion for cooking. This is why he would cook so often in the apartment.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has not been smooth at all.
We are in our 20s with no credit and no history of opening businesses–this is also our very first location. As such, landlords did not want anything to do with us. It took us over 11 months to find our location and it was the last location we checked before we gave up on the dream altogether! Talk about good fortune
We also opened during the thick of COVID (October 2020). We had to open with limited dine-in capacity and with our main audience (office workers in Midtown) gone and working from home, it was a struggle to get sales.
Several times the restaurant needed to shut down for repairs or maintenance or plumbing leaks (the previous tenant did not take good care of it at all)
In January 2021, 75% of the staff contracted COVID from an anti-mask individual. We had to resort to doing dinners only and working the remaining 25% of the staff to the brink to keep ourselves afloat
In June/July 2021, the nation’s largest food suppliers were having labor shortages and quality control issues, so restaurants across the country could not keep up with the demand. As a result, wing stores nearby had smaller wings and had to charge much more. Butcher shops could no longer offer certain cuts of meat–grocery stores were having shortages. As a result of all of this, we were not able to receive certain basic items such as eggs or habanero peppers.
In August 2021, the national restaurant labor shortage hit us so hard that we had to temporarily close for 2.5 weeks just to hire more people. We had been paying 15$/hr since October 2020, so many people incorrectly accused us of not paying a fair enough wage, but it is not quite that simple.
We’ve been impressed with Mukja Korean Fried Chicken, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We are a home-grown, independently-owned small business that wants nothing more than to give back to the city that raised us. We are founded by two best friends who came up with the idea as a joke during college but became more and more serious about it as time went on. We are known for offering Fried Chicken with Korean Influence (similar to Mexican Tacos w/ Korean ingredients like Takorea or the Food trucks in Los Angeles). We believe in having good food and sharing good times with good people and we strive to treat every guest, every staff member, every vendor, and anyone else who comes into contact with us with love and respect. We even pay our staff almost 2X the current federal minimum wage, schedule them for a max of 40 hours per week (unheard of in the restaurant industry), and offer flexibility with scheduling and excellent quality of life. We are trying to reverse the trend of overworking and underpaying restaurant employees.
An important thing to also note is that this restaurant is a testament to never quitting and pursuing your dreams. In one of the previous answers, I mentioned Sean’s personal struggle with being paralyzed in his car accident–not once did he quit on his dreams and this restaurant still came true despite all of those setbacks. The restaurant itself is living proof that you can do anything if you want it bad enough
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
The main things that I think people overlook are:
1) How well we treat our staff and how we advocate for fair wages and better quality of life for restaurant workers
2) We are Korean-Southern food, not just Korean. Sean and I are both Korean Americans–born and raised as the sons of immigrants. Neither the Korean nor the American community accepts us fully b/c of our “half” nature, so we have to make our own way. In a broader social sense, we are paving the road for Asian-American identity–an identity that never gets a voice in mainstream media and that many people don’t even know exists
