Three childhood best friends-turned-business partners opened the C as in Charlie in September 2022 after sharing a dream of starting a restaurant in New York City that seamlessly blended their Korean culture and Southern roots.
“The whole concept [of jeong] is similar to Southern hospitality,” Yun continued. “In Korea, when you move to a new neighborhood, you share banchan … and that’s something we really wanted to bring to New York. A restaurant is more than great food and drinks, it should be serving hospitality, and that’s what we very naturally grew up with.”
Steve Choi added, “As Southern boys who came to New York, we felt like a lot of New Yorkers lived alone, apart from their family, so we wanted to kind of make this space into a second home where they could be treated and welcomed.”
The menu, designed for sharing and sparking conversation with fellow patrons, has a slate of standout dishes, including mushroom bibimbap inspired by one of Eric Choi’s childhood staples.
Coming from the kitchen at the Nomad Hotel, Eric Choi told “GMA” that he has “infused a lot of the dishes with the skills I’ve learned in the past and my childhood memories.”
“When my parents were out of the house and working, I would open up the fridge, grab butter and soy sauce and rice and mix them together to eat it — just like a peanut butter and jelly,” he recalled of his go-to convenient comfort food growing up. “I elevated it [for the restaurant] by adding on ingredients like maitake [or hen of the woods mushroom], soft poached egg, pickled shallot and dill.”
For Yun, another dish that transports him back to his childhood — one that customers have been equally obsessed with — is the restaurant’s ox bone marrow cream pasta, which is inspired by his mom’s seolleongtang, or ox bone soup.
“When I first came to the United States with my family, I was 10 years old and we went to Salisbury, Maryland,” Yun said. “At the time, there weren’t a lot of Korean supermarkets, but my parents would always try to cook Korean food at home.”
His mom’s stewed ox bone soup became a spaghetti-based pasta dish when she was unable to find Korean-style wheat noodles and ended up mimicking the flavors in a new format.
“It tastes like the soup itself, but it’s very creamy, more like a carbonara. But it definitely has that ox bone marrow kick to it,” Yun said. “That’s my favorite dish.”
