Kore Nashville is the slow-burning love letter between Korean soul and the smokehouse tradition of the American South. This is the story of how a Seoul-born chef, a Music City pitmaster, and a century of shared fire came to share a single dining room.
It started in 2017 over a plate of galbi at a basement joint in Gangnam. Chef Min-jun Park — then running a French-Korean tasting counter in Seoul — sat across from Daniel Cole, a fourth-generation Tennessee pitmaster who had been sent east by his grandmother with a suitcase of her rub recipes and a single instruction: "find out what else the world does with smoke." They talked for six hours, ordered a second round of soju, and by the end of the night had sketched, on the back of a napkin, the bones of what would become Kore.
Two years of pop-ups followed — at a H Mart parking lot in Hermitage, in the alley behind a honky-tonk on Lower Broadway, at a kimchi festival in Knoxville — refining the grammar of a cuisine that didn't yet have a name. In 2019 they signed the lease on a red-brick storefront in The Gulch, brick-smoked a thousand pounds of pork belly, and opened the doors. The line has not really ended since.
We are not a Korean restaurant that smokes meat, and we are not a Nashville barbecue joint with gochujang on the shelf. We are a third thing — built on respect, restraint, and a stubborn belief that the best cuisines share the same grandmother's hands.
Korean barbecue and Tennessee smoke were both born from the same constraint: tough cuts, cheap fuel, time, and patience. We use hickory and oak the way a Seoul auntie uses her cast iron — as an inheritance, not an accessory.
Our short rib comes from a single herd of Black Angus at a family farm outside Lascassas. Our kimchi is fermented in-house from napa grown by Korean-American growers in Tullahoma. If it can't be traced, it doesn't end up on your plate.
The menu changes more often than you'd think. Stone fruit in July means a gochujang-glazed peach on the bone-in pork. First frost means doenjang-braised collards. We follow the Tennessee calendar as closely as the Korean one.
We don't love counting things — but a few of these numbers tell the story better than we can.
A short, stubborn list of the people who make Kore possible. We are loud about them on purpose.
Restaurants are people, then recipes. Four of the many who keep Kore running, listed in the order they showed up.
Trained in Seoul and Paris. Built Kore's fermentation program from a single 5-gallon crock in his East Nashville apartment.
Fourth-generation Tennessee barbecue man. Tends the smokers like they owe him money. Holds the family rub recipe under lock and key.
Brought up on her halmoni's kitchen in Daegu. Runs the 40-crock fermentation wall and writes the daily banchan menu from memory.
A whiskey-obsessed Vandy grad who built our bourbon-and-soju cocktail list. Also responsible for the smoked-yaupon ice cream you didn't know you needed.
Reading is fine. Tasting is better. Pull up a chair — we'll bring the smoke, the kimchi, and a playlist that makes both feel at home.