Most New York neighborhoods spread. Koreatown climbed. The center of it is a single block — West Thirty-Second Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, officially co-named Korea Way — and the reason it holds more than a hundred businesses is that they are stacked on top of one another, four and five and eleven stories of them, reached by elevators and by staircases that give no hint of what is at the top. Walk it at street level and you have seen perhaps a third of it. This is the essential fact about the neighborhood, and everything else follows from it.
The Ground Before
The blocks were not empty when the Korean businesses arrived; they were cheap. This was the southern reach of the Garment District, and by the 1970s it was in decline — mixed-use buildings with small upper floors, the kind of space that suits a workroom and can be had at a workroom’s rent. Just to the south and east, a Korean wholesale trade had already taken root, running roughly from Twenty-Fourth to Thirty-Fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth, importing and distributing goods. The people who would open the first restaurants were, in many cases, already working nearby.
That trade was more particular than the word wholesale suggests, and more telling. Through the 1960s Korean firms took space on Broadway around Thirty-Second Street because the rent was low, the transport good, and the buildings had room to store stock. Almost all of them dealt in wigs. And almost none of them opened anything at street level — they worked from offices upstairs, behind doors that told you nothing. The block was already invisible from the sidewalk two decades before the first restaurant arrived.
What made a community possible rather than merely a trade was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the national-origin quotas that had held Asian immigration to a trickle for four decades. The Koreans who arrived under it came in numbers, and many came with professional training and an inclination toward self-employment.
The First Doors
Manhattan’s first Korean restaurant was not on this block, and it did not open in 1979. It was Mi Cin, which opened on the first of March 1960 at 130 West Forty-Fifth Street, sat three hundred and twenty, and advertised itself with a neon sign in Hangul. The Times reviewed it that July, praised the seasoning, called the japchae extraordinary, and complained that the English on the menu was impossible to follow. Three more opened that decade — Arirang on West Fifty-Sixth, Sam Bok on West Forty-Third, New Korea on East Fortieth — and by the middle of the seventies there were more than eighteen, scattered across midtown wherever the customers were.
We know this because of Lee Kyou-Jin, a food historian who reconstructed the record in 2011 from Korean and American newspapers and from interviews with the proprietors still living. That work overturned an account that had stood for decades.
Korean restaurants reached this street later, and quietly. Seoul House was trading at 9 West Thirty-Second by September 1972. New York Kom Tang Kalbi House opened in 1979, settled at number 32, grilled short ribs over wood chips around the clock, and outlasted every restaurant of its generation — by 2011 it was the last of them still open anywhere in Manhattan. It has since closed too, which is worth saying plainly, because the block does not preserve itself sentimentally.
So what happened here in the seventies and eighties was not the beginning of Korean food in New York. It was the moment Korean food stopped being spread thinly across midtown and gathered into one place. A Korean bookstore and a handful of restaurants followed in 1980. By the late eighties there were cosmetics shops and import-export offices, and the block that had been a rundown edge of the Garment District had become something else.
The capital came from an arrangement that deserves more attention than it usually receives. Banks did not lend readily to new immigrants, so families used kye — rotating credit associations, in which a group contributes a fixed sum on a fixed schedule and each member in turn takes the whole pot. It is a lending system built entirely on the assumption that no one will take their turn and vanish. A great many of the doors on this street were opened with money raised that way, and it answers the question of how a neighborhood like this comes into being: not from investment, but from trust, formalized.
Why It Went Up
The location had obvious advantages — Penn Station, Herald Square, the subway lines converging beneath Thirty-Fourth Street, the Empire State Building a block east. But Manhattan rents rise with visibility, and a ground-floor storefront on this block was never within reach of a small operator for long. So the businesses went upstairs, where the rent is lower and the passing trade is nil, and they compensated with signage: stacked vertical signs in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, climbing the facades, each one advertising a room you cannot see from the sidewalk.
The result is a street that reads more like Seoul than like Manhattan, and it rewards a particular kind of curiosity — the willingness to open an unmarked door and ride an elevator to the fourth floor on the strength of a sign. This is worth stating outright: the instinct to stay at street level will cost you most of the neighborhood.
Korea Way
The city co-named the block Korea Way, and the bilingual street sign is now the most photographed object on it. The designation ratified what was already true: over a hundred small businesses on that single stretch, and something above a hundred and fifty across the wider neighborhood, ranging from ten-seat counters to the New York branches of Korean banking conglomerates. The nickname that stuck — the Korean Times Square — gets at the density and the light, though not at the quiet upper rooms.
The Wave
What changed in the two thousands was the audience. Hallyu — the Korean wave, carrying pop music, television, film and skincare — turned Korean culture into a global export, and Koreatown from a place where Korean New Yorkers went to eat into a place where everyone did. The block itself had been marking the calendar far longer than that: the Korean Parade and Festival has run since 1980, the parade coming down Sixth Avenue each October and the street festival filling Thirty-Second, and it now draws crowds well into six figures.
The wave was also policy, which is less widely known. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997 gutted the Korean economy, cultural export became an instrument of national recovery, and the government set about marketing the country abroad with the deliberateness usually reserved for trade. Some of what you walk through on this street was decided in Seoul.
One thing the block never became, through any of this, was a place to live. Koreatown in Manhattan has always been a district of business rather than of homes; the Korean residential neighborhoods are elsewhere — Flushing, Bayside, and across the river in Palisades Park and Fort Lee. What Thirty-Second Street offers is a community at work rather than a community at rest, which is part of why it can feel so concentrated and why it empties differently than a residential block does.
The edges have been moving ever since — east along Thirty-Second toward Madison, north toward Thirty-Sixth, south into the low Thirties and the high Twenties. Koreatown is not a fixed four blocks. It is a center with a widening margin, and some of the most interesting rooms are now outside the historic core.
None of which is settled, and it would be misleading to present it as though it were. Korean nationals and Korean Americans do not always agree about what counts as authentic on this street, or about who has the standing to decide. The sociologist Jinwon Kim, who spent a decade studying the neighborhood, treats that disagreement as central rather than incidental — a contest over symbolic ownership of the space and, behind it, over who belongs to the nation. You are walking through an argument, not a conclusion.
Three Kinds of Door
Walking the block today you will pass three quite different sorts of business, and the useful thing is to know which is which rather than to rank them.
There are the chains, more numerous than they were a decade ago — Korean and Korean-American brands with several branches, bright and consistent and open late. The temptation is to read them as dilution, and the truth is closer to the reverse. Kim’s account of the neighborhood, published by NYU Press in 2026 and built on a hundred and thirty-five interviews, holds that the franchises are the visible edge of the branding strategy — Korean companies, many of them mid-sized rather than vast, using this block as a shop window onto the American market. The chains are not something that happened to Koreatown. They are part of what built it.
They are also genuinely good at what they do. If you want fried chicken at eleven at night, or a skincare range you already know by name, or a menu with photographs and English throughout, a chain is not a compromise. It is the right answer, and we recommend them without apology.
There are the family-run rooms, some of them thirty and forty years in the same spot, often upstairs, frequently with a menu that assumes you know what you want. These reward a little preparation — a dish named in advance, a word about what the house does best — which is precisely what the desk is for. The right counter with the right order gives you an evening that cannot be had anywhere else in the city.
And there is the third thing, which is the most exciting development in New York dining and is happening on and around this block. Hooni Kim took a Michelin star at Danji in 2011, the first Korean chef-restaurateur in America to do so. Jungsik opened in TriBeCa the same year, held two stars for a decade, and in December 2024 became the first Korean restaurant in the United States to be awarded three — a distinction that, at the time, no restaurant in Korea itself held. Atomix keeps two stars in a Murray Hill townhouse. Joo Ok, on the sixteenth floor of 22 West Thirty-Second, was promoted to two stars in the 2025 guide, which means one of the finest Korean tasting menus in the world is served directly above Korea Way. Nōksu holds a star in a former barbershop in the basement of the Herald Square subway entrance.
That progression — from a wood-fired grill room in 1979 to a three-star dining room and a two-star counter above the same street — is the whole story of the neighborhood in miniature. It took forty-five years and it happened mostly upstairs.
Where to Begin
Walk the block once at street level in daylight to get its shape, then again after dark, when the vertical signs are lit and the scale of what is above you becomes legible. Then choose a door and go up. The desk is glad to make the choice for you, and gladder still to book the room at the top.
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