It's no secret that Edmontonians love Seoul food. When the Lee House Korean BBQ restaurant relocated to Chinatown, Jake Lee’s parents tasked him with salvaging the restaurant’s former location off Whyte Avenue. A seasoned chef and NAIT grad with a penchant for experimentation, Jake decided to bring Edmonton its very own Korean fried chicken spot – Seoul Fried Chicken.
“Mom and dad pressed the SOS button on me and wanted some help,” Jake explains. “So I thought, ‘What can I do to flip this restaurant around in such little time?’ And the only thing that popped in my head was that Edmonton needed some kind of comfort food." After a three-month turnaround, Seoul Fried Chicken opened in February 2016 at the height of the economic downturn. At the time, people were beginning to shift away from high-end dining to budget-friendly independent restaurants. Opening a fried chicken concept seemed like an obvious choice. “I knew that Edmontonians would embrace really good comfort value food,” Jake says. “And that made me think fried chicken, because that was something lacking.”
Fried chicken is not a traditional Korean dish, but it’s emerged as one of the “it” foods of South Korea. “Seoul has always embraced different cultures and cuisines around the world and made it their own,” Jake says. Most Korean fried chicken spots in South Korea have three or four flavours, while their North American counterparts usually only have one or two. Jake decided to take things one step further by developing seven original flavours for his menu.
