Eunhae Bae → Sophia Cho
A restaurant named after a city, run by a family from it.
The name
A city, not a family name
Jeonju sits in the southwest of South Korea and is widely held to be the country’s culinary capital — the place bibimbap comes from, and the region whose home cooking, Jeollado cooking, is built on soups, stews and noodles rather than the grill.
The restaurant is named after it directly. That is the whole thesis: not Korean food broadly, but one region’s cooking, made the way one family from there makes it.
The founder
Eunhae Bae
Eunhae Bae came from Jeonju and opened the kitchen on 150th Street. She was the original head chef, and the recipes on the menu today are hers.
Her photograph is still on the awning outside, with a year painted underneath it. Regulars have walked past it for decades.
The kitchen today
Sophia Cho
Sophia Cho, Eunhae’s daughter, took the restaurant over from her mother and runs it now. She kept on the kitchen staff who had been there from the beginning, and has kept to her mother’s approach rather than modernising away from it.
Homecoming NYC, which held a community Lunar New Year dinner here in 2025, described what she has built as a haven for people who love traditional Korean food in Queens.
How it is cooked
From scratch, and from the garden
The kitchen makes its components from scratch and grows vegetables for the restaurant in the family garden — the napa cabbage in the gamjatang comes from there.
The noodles are made by hand: kalguksu rolled and cut, sujebi torn piece by piece into the broth. Both take time that a busy kitchen could easily save. Neither has been dropped.
The awning
Since 1985. Or 1999.
The awning says 1985. Facebook, and most listings, say the restaurant has been at this address since 1999. Both have been true in print for years and we have not tried to resolve it here. If you ask Sophia in person, you will get the real answer — which is more than a website can offer.
Asian-owned, women-owned
Both, per the restaurant’s own listing. It has been in one family the whole time.
Around thirty seats
A small room. Reviewers reach for “cosy”, “homey” and, more than once, “like a grandmother’s kitchen”.
In the Food Alley
Murray Hill’s 먹자골목, the Korean corridor that grew east from Main Street in the 2000s. Near the Murray Hill LIRR (Port Washington branch).