Family Footsteps

Nali Kwon, co-owner of Noori Pocha, originally wanted to be a painter. Instead, she found a different creative outlet: creating Korean drinking food that has become wildly popular at the gastropub she owns with her brother.

NALI KWON grew up in a family of restaurateurs, but she never thought she’d be one herself one day.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, she would eat with her family at her maternal grandmother’s Korean barbecue restaurant, enjoying favorites like galbi (marinated short rib and ribeye) and mul-naengmyeon (cold noodles in broth), and stay until late at night because she was close with her grandmother. Her great-grandmother also had a restaurant that specialized in another Korean favorite: soup.

She immigrated to the U.S. as a kid, leaving Grandma’s restaurant thousands of miles away. In middle school as a boarding school student, she’d struggle to find things in the cafeteria that tasted remotely Korean and she was missing the flavors of home. As a college student in New York City, where she was studying fine arts, she decided to start cooking for herself.

“Eating was very important, because I love food,” Kwon says.

She’d go to H Mart in Koreatown and buy ingredients to make doenjangjjigae (fermented soybean paste soup), kimchi jjigae (kimchi soup), spicy cold noodles and kimchi fried rice—lots of it. She asked her mom a lot of questions and, like many kids reaching out to their parents for specifics on how to cook their favorite dishes, got answers like “you know it by a feeling” and cook by “ratio,” like “one sugar and two soy sauce.” (What, exactly, those measurements were supposed to be was still a mystery to her.)

“Sometimes I would mess it up,” she says, “but other times it was really tasty, and I was so happy.”

She’d share the food with her roommate, who was also Korean, and later cook for her eventual husband, whom she met when she was in her senior year of college.

The couple relocated to Rochester Hills seven years ago with their young family and Kwon continued cooking for the family.

She doesn’t do as much home cooking today because she’s busy cooking at Noori Pocha in Clawson, a Korean gastropub she co-owns with her brother, Andy. The siblings first opened Noori Chicken, part of a national chain specializing in Korean fried chicken, in late 2021 and later branched out with a sit-down restaurant.

She decided to foray into the Michigan dining scene because she thought she could add something unique and different. “I thought, ‘I could do [a Korean restaurant] here, and people would like it,’” she says.

She and Chef Sanghwan Bak, who goes by Park, collaborated on the menu, which is brief by design because they didn’t want to offer too much and offer something just for the sake of offering it. They were intentional about building a different menu and offering something new.

“We did not want to have hundreds of items on the menu. We wanted to include dishes that were 100 percent satisfying to me and Park. [For example] we did not want to do jjampong, a Korean Chinese seafood soup with noodles in it. A lot of Korean restaurants will include that because Koreans love that but we didn’t want to because everyone has it.”

Some of their top dishes include bulgogi (her kids’ favorite) and kimchi fried rice, which can be accentuated with prime beef, cheese and egg.

She also incorporated a couple of dishes that she would cook at home, like the spicy pork and spicy chicken.

“I perfectly fit into the restaurant business because I love cooking for people around me, and I love seeing them enjoying my food and giving me feedback,” Kwon says. “That really gives me a lot of joy. Even at Noori, when I see people enjoying the food that [Chef Bak] and I created, when I see them, it’s such a great feeling to serve people and see their smiles.”

For someone who never set out to own a restaurant, Kwon is just getting started in the restaurant industry.

She still has the recipes from her family’s restaurants and while she doesn’t use them at Noori Pocha now, she does have plans for them.

“My final goal would be to continue the recipes and open a restaurant with the recipes that I inherited,” she says.

Dorothy Hernandez is a freelance journalist who frequently writes about food at the intersection of culture, entrepreneurship and social justice. She also started cooking in college when she wanted more tastes of home (in her case Filipino food) and learned from the best— her mom.