[chill upbeat music] - [Wes] Also super old school.

I still like writing things down.

A lot of these ingredients I only know in Korean.

When I see the English, it's like, oh, that's what those are!

Restaurants and bars play a pretty vital role in community.

When you learn a different language, they say like, oh, you learn the curse words first!

Yeah, but when you learn a culture, you learn the food first.

Food is a great language.

The Gerald is a cocktail bar.

I took this place over in 2018.

It became more of a gastro pub style.

Fries, popcorn, and deep fried mac and cheese, you know.

February of 2020, we were 40% up above February of 2019, and we were all very excited about it.

I think January, February, right around then is the first time I actually started saying to people, like my family and close friends, like, Hey, I think I finally got this.

You know, I think I figured this out.

And I think I survived the most volatile times.

[wok sizzles] During this time, you know, we're learning about this thing called Corona virus.

You know, I'm talking to my parents in Korea, and it's a big deal.

And then March 15th, Sunday comes, and you know, we were doing brunch, and we had had two customers.

So I say, okay, let's go home.

And then it just kinda came crashing down.

[somber music] I'm up in the morning, and I don't know what to do.

You know, just looking for a way to, then again, convince myself that the work that I had put in wasn't for nothing.

I just started having cravings for Korean food all the time.

You know, it's like a cliche thing.

So what do you revert to?

You know, where do you seek comfort?

You're not getting it in day-to-day life anymore.

All the childhood, and you know, all those memories just came back.

You know, it was like, bam.

These guys right here.

Like, I remember when I was a kid, stores used to sell this, because they're individually packaged inside and you could get one pack for 5 cents back in those days.

And that was like a big deal.

Yeah, I just, you know, started eating differently, started, you know, thinking differently.

You know, I started thinking, well, if I'm going down, you know, I'm going down the way I want to, you know?

Yeah, we went back to the drawing board.

Let's build this menu from ground up.

It is now officially a Korean restaurant slash cocktail bar.

I left Korea at a relatively early age, I was 13.

When I first came over, the grownups in my life would constantly tell me, make sure you don't just hang out with Korean kids at school, because then you won't learn the language.

You know, you won't really learn the culture.

Being an Asian person in Seattle area, I've been asked many, many times, people just going well, oh, do you work for Microsoft?

You know, it's like this assumption of like, well, people who, you know, are from where you're from or people who look like you tend to do these things.

Sort of by default, you know, people are going, well, are you gonna to do Korean food?

Are you gonna do Korean food?

I don't want to be what people just expect me to be.

As a minority person in this country, I've got to speak for the culture.

The more I think about it, the more I process it, because I had so much time to do that.

You know, you start to think, well, was I conditioned to run away from my identity?

We don't have to mess too much with what has literally thousands of years of tradition behind it.

I felt like my culture wasn't getting the credit that it was due.

There's more to Korean food than Korean barbecue.

You know, there's so much more.

And, you know I've gotta find a way to kinda show that off.

The thing that food does for us, you know, it evokes certain feelings.

I think, you know, I learned to embrace my story better and you know, my culture better.

Now, more than ever, I feel like this is mine.

I refuse to just sit here and say, oh, I can't wait for the new normal to come back.

You know, I can't wait for that.

Life and lives have been altered, you know, forever, because of, you know, what we've been through this year.

I've learned how to stay motivated and driven and ambitious.

You know, when everything is against you.

If you look back at history, there are a lot of moments that I imagined that people of that era would have felt like they were moving backwards.

But, we look back on it now, and really, did we ever move backwards?