FALL QUARTER 2018
KTOWN
BITES
A LOOK INTO THE DEVELOPMENT
OF KOREATOWN RESTAURANTS
BACKGROUND
Beyond the glass skyscraper skyline of downtown Los Angeles and situated off the I-10 freeway is none other than the famous Koreatown, a bustling neighborhood that is home to a vibrant fusion of cultures and a flourishing economy. Spanning over 150 blocks, this neighborhood has developed over many decades and has witnessed the rise and falls of immigration and the birth of a variety of businesses that ultimately contribute to the heart and soul of Koreatown.
In the realm of digital humanities, our team is interested in the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Koreatown over time, from 1960 to present day. Using the data from the complete listing of all the active businesses currently registered with the Los Angeles Office of Finance as our initial starting point, we allow our curiosity to explore different questions and we hope to understand some of the contours of one of the most well-known ethnic enclaves and the factors that influence its growth. We hope to do so by framing our analysis through the lens of the establishments of full-service restaurants in Koreatown, as restaurants provide some of the most visible, frequented, and culturally relevant landmarks for the many particular neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
With this website, we hope to be able to replicate the progression of our thoughts and reflections and how we came to understand the development of restaurants in Koreatown. Because we desire a comprehensive understanding through a multitude of angles, our research includes a diverse range of content from academic literature, data visualizations, to even in-person interviews. We invite you to navigate through our site and interact with our visualizations to learn more about the rich history of Koreatown. For a more comprehensive picture, begin your journey at the home page and work your way in order through the table of contents, narrowing your focus from the big picture of businesses in Koreatown down to Koreatown’s full-service restaurant industry. For a quick view, feel free to choose from the table of contents which topics interest you most.
INVESTIGATION
QUESTION
We want to explore why the top sector of Koreatown are as prevalent as they, specifically how and why restaurants came into play. We seek answers as to how the development of restaurants changed over time in relation to the development of Koreatown and the successes and challenges in between. Furthermore, we wanted to dive deeper and dissect, examining the different possible socioeconomic reasons and cultural factors that influenced the development
HYPOTHESIS
Our hypothesis concerning of the development of restaurants in Koreatown is that because restaurants are deeply rooted in cultural heritage and transcend generations, we predict that over time, there will be an upward trend in the establishment Korean restaurants regardless of economic factors, but rather propelled by sociocultural factors.
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BREAKING DOWN BUSINESSES
This infographic shows 3 key figures breaking down our data set. From the full listing of the active business registered to the Los Angeles Office of Finance, there are 509,186 active businesses available as of this year October in 2018. We then limited our scope to exploring ethnoburbs, specifically Koreatown, by filtering for the businesses defined by the zipcodes of Koreatown. After limiting our scope, we obtained 14,090 active businesses. From the 14,090 active business we limited our data to the 429 full-time restaurants in Koreatown.
KOREATOWN STATISTICS
202,318
PEOPLE IN KOREATOWN
2.7
$34,863
SQUARED MILES
MEDIAN INCOME
IDENTIFYING
THE KOREATOWN ECONOMY
Service businesses drive entrepreneurship in Koreatown, and this emphasis on the service economy can be observed in the adjacent tree map, where the five largest business sectors all fall under the service industry umbrella.
IDENTIFYING THE KOREATOWN ECONOMY
The proportionately large emphasis on the service economy in Koreatown is consistent with academic sources and literature. Entrepreneurship in Koreatown has historically been concentrating in industries with low upfront-capital costs with low-to-medium skilled workers. Analysis of the companies in our database reveals trends that affirm this description, with the top 5 companies all being in the service economy, and representing 31% of total businesses.
One bias to consider in our data source is that we are examining a list of all registered businesses in Koreatown, while there may be many unregistered businesses as well. However, we hypothesize that the proportion of businesses within an industry that are registered varies by industry, as some may have fundamental properties that make it more or less likely to be registered online.
For example, our largest business segment is in real estate, an industry whose tight recordkeeping guidelines and robust legal infrastructure necessitate that any dealings with real estate be official and recorded. Therefore, in our analysis real estate representation as a proportion of all businesses may be overblown, whereas other industries that have a higher percentage of unregistered businesses may be underrepresented. In relation to restaurants, this may create some issues of underrepresentation, since restaurants may have tax incentives to not officially register.
GROWTH OF RESTAURANTS
IN RELATION TO HISTORICAL EVENTS
In the second half of the 20th century, the broader US economy was being transformed from one that was driven by small businesses to one that became characterized by centralization and concentration of capital. However, the economy in Koreatown has seen entrepreneurship thrive as new businesses emerged at an increasing rate. The business environment encouraged the formation of specific types of businesses over others as well. Most of the new businesses were part of the service economy and shared similar characteristics like having low capital requirements, being able to pay wages, and requiring low skill.
We chose to focus our attention on restaurants in Koreatown due to its reputation as a major culinary hotspot of Los Angeles. We wanted to examine why restaurants were so popular in Koreatown, and uncover the stories behind what founders were considering when opening their businesses. Our hypothesis was that the cultural significance of food in Korean society was a largely contributing factor, amongst other reasons. We decided to gather data to test our hypothesis by interviewing restaurant owners in Koreatown, and asking them ourselves.
In the 1930s, there were roughly 650 Koreans living in Los Angeles, living roughly in an area bounded by Adams Blvd, Slauson Blvd, Western Ave and Vermont Ave. In 1936, the Korean National Association moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The Shelley v Kraemer Supreme Court case prohibited racially-segregated housing in 1948, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed Asian migration restrictions, both helping to promote Korean expansion in Koreatown.
Throughout the 1970s, Korean immigrants became major real-estate owners in Koreatown. In the 1980s, destruction occurs in Koreatown, intensifying security in the neighborhood. The stage was then set for the Rodney King Riots in 1992; law enforcement abandoned the neighborhood in favor of defending Beverly Hills and Hollywood, forcing shopkeepers to fend for themselves. Overall, the neighborhood sustained almost $400 million in damages. Since the riots, Koreatown has experienced exponential growth, assisted by urban development projects and investments by the city of Los Angeles.
MAPPING KOREATOWN RESTAURANTS
DEFINING THE BORDERS
The map to the left indicates all restaurants currently registered and gives a visual representation what streets the restaurants are clustered on. The restaurants data more or less define the shape of Koreatown, with heavy activity on streets like 6th street, Wilshire Blvd, Olympic Blvd, 8th street. To filter our businesses to only include those ones within Koreatown, we defined the neighborhood’s borders based on the L.A. Times Mapping Neighborhoods project.
This animation displays the geographic patterns among restaurant establishments in Koreatown over time. The restaurants, inputted into mapping software as point data, are represented visually as a heatmap, showing the relative density of restaurants in Koreatown and their accumulation over the decades. Red areas represent those with the most data points, while bluer areas contain the fewest. The first Korean restaurants started showing up in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, by which time there were around twenty in number. As Korean immigration increased in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the number of restaurants in existence in Koreatown increased, though the biggest explosion came in the 2000s and the 2010s, when the amount of restaurants surpassed 100 and ultimately reached the number today of around 430. At present, most of the restaurants in the area have clustered around Wilshire and Olympic Boulevards, as well as on some significant cross streets such as Western Ave and Vermont Ave. The spatial pattern of Korean residence and their business foundations was originally restricted to the Bunker Hill area as a result of racial covenants made by the city. Koreans, likely migrating along with their friends, families, and community members, ultimately shifted to Olympic Boulevard - where they have more or less remained up to today - following the 1965 Riots in Watts. According to business owners we interviewed, geographic hotspots of business in Koreatown exist today based on word of mouth and social media informing increasingly diverse residents of where the best places to eat are.
To get more intimate with our data, some team members took individual tours of restaurants in Koreatown. This particular tour, undertaken by GIS specialist Riley on November 19th, attempted to stop at at least one restaurant founded during each decade. This tour was very qualitative in nature whose purpose was to get a brief look at what a more or less random sample of restaurants and their front awning designs look like. Each point on the map contains a caption with a photo of the restaurant.
RESTAURANTS BY CATEGORIES
Within Koreatown lies a hodgepodge of culture that allows for collaboration among different ethnic groups in order to build broader social and economic networks that transcend the boundaries of the ethnic enclave of the city.
DIVERSITY OF FOODS
The packed bubbles graph above reflects this diversity, with some of the top types of food served being Korean, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, and American. Also among the top, however, are “karaoke” and “bar,” which can be explained by the shift in business types after the stores and restaurants destroyed by the 1992 riots were replaced with bars, karaoke, and “singing” rooms to foster the Koreatown’s budding nightlife.
PRICE LEVELS
$ = under $10, $$ = $11-30, and $$ = $31-60.
The adjacent pie chart reflects the price ranges of restaurants in Koreatown. Because Korean immigrant entrepreneurs tend to concentrate their businesses in low income communities, it would be logical that a majority of the restaurants in Koreatown are in the one to two dollar sign price range.
INTERVIEWS
For a more personal approach, we conducted interviews with two restaurant owners, one in person and one over the phone, discussing their motives behind opening their business and they challenged they've faced as Korean entrepreneurs.
COMPARISON OF SHARED TERMS
The blue line corresponds with the relative frequency of terms in our interview at Jeon Ju; the green with the interview at Street Food of Seoul. Both interviewees focused on the term "customers" and their role customers play in their businesses (the second interview used the word 'clientele' more often). This relative frequency graph of both interviewees' use of the word points to their thought processes about the customer's changing tastes and preferences.
CONTRAST OF SELECT TERMS
We also wanted to find terms that were particularly unique to each interviewee; Jennifer Lee of Jeon Ju, which specializes in the specific style of Korean food known as bibimbap, emphasized bibimbap at the beginning of her interview and how she learned the style from her Korean father. Susie Suh of Street Food of Seoul (not a bibimbap restaurant) went into detail about the crucial role that social media - particularly Instagram - plays in the promotion of her business.
STREET FOOD OF SEOUL
SUSIE SUH
"I know a lot of my peers who have opened restaurants, their reason for it is a lot more passion based or an exploration of their cultural identities. But for the older generations, especially with my dad, I would say it’s one of the few things that they have available for them in the U.S., like an avenue for livelihood - it’s opening a small business or a restaurant."
JEON JU
SUN MI LEE
"The customers are changing. We used to have a lot of Korean older customers, now we have many non-Korean customers...Young people prefer to have a little bit sweeter and saltier [food] than the older people."
JEON JU
CONCLUSION
Through our socio-cultural exploration of Koreatown, we were able to confirm our hypothesis that the cultural significance of food was a primary contributor to the large proportion of restaurants. This is apparent primarily in our timeline and our interviews with restaurant owners. Seeing the delight in the restaurant owner’s faces as we asked them about their jobs was uplifting and highlighted the importance of culinary tradition in Koreatown. It brought them a sense of home, and food formed the bedrock for a unified community. The timeline also highlights how major socio-economic events had little impact in the growth of restaurants.