Paik Jong-won’s Restaurant Empire Is Looking to Canada for Its Next Act

Paik Jong-won is the most recognizable restaurateur in Korea, and since Culinary Class Wars arrived on Netflix he has been recognizable a long way past it. On Tuesday his company said that name is going to Canada.

The Born Korea announced that Paik had signed a memorandum of understanding with Sunray Group, a Canadian hotel and real estate company, covering cooperation on restaurants. The first job is modest on paper. A restaurant Sunray already operates in Markham, in the Greater Toronto Area, will be converted into one of Paik’s brands. Which brand is still being chosen. No opening date has been set.

Paik, also spelled Baek Jong-won, founded the company in 1994 and has been traveling North America since August 2. Sunray’s founder and chief executive, Rattan Gupta, who goes by Ray, stood with him in Toronto for the signing photograph the company released. The announcement described Sunray as running about 80 hotels in Canada under flags including Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. After Markham, the two sides said they would consider more Born Korea rooms in Sunray hotels and commercial buildings.

The Born Korea runs about 25 dining brands at home and listed on the Kospi in November 2024. What travels is not a chef’s tasting menu. It is a short list of dishes a kitchen can cook the same way in Busan, Jakarta, and now Ontario.

Hong Kong Banjum shows the type. It is a Korean-Chinese shop built on jajangmyeon, wheat noodles under a glossy black bean sauce, and jjamppong, the red seafood noodle soup people order when they want to sweat a little. It has been in the United States since 2009 and made up most of the company’s American shops in figures published earlier this year. Saemaul Sikdang, sold abroad as Paik’s BBQ, grills marinated pork over briquettes and sends out a pork and kimchi stew the menu insists is best at seven minutes. Hanshin Pocha takes the street tent indoors: soju, fried snacks, a table that stays late. Any of them would sit comfortably in a hotel restaurant that already owns a kitchen and a lunch crowd. Paik’s Coffee, the cheap-coffee chain the company has aimed at the United States and Japan, is the most standardized of the group. None has been named for Markham.

His face does much of the selling. It sits on storefronts across Korea, and streaming carried it abroad, first through Culinary Class Wars and then The Genius Paik, his tvN series, which drops him into Marrakesh, Naples, and most recently Lyon to open a Korean restaurant where almost nobody has eaten one. The same argument runs through TBK, the sauce line he launched last September so kitchens overseas can get kimchi or fried-chicken flavor without importing a commissary. In Canada he met two large distributors about those bottles. In the United States his company said it would begin producing Hong Kong Banjum’s sweet-and-sour pork sauce with a global manufacturer it did not name, then use that plant to supply the region.

Canada makes sense as a first hotel room. The 2021 census counted about 218,000 Korean Canadians, and the Toronto area holds the largest group of them, with the older Koreatown on Bloor Street and a busier newer strip along Yonge in Willowdale. Markham is neither of those. It is a suburban city in the same metro with deep Asian dining already, sitting on exactly the hotel and plaza traffic Sunray feeds. A converted room there can find out whether a Paik brand pulls hotel guests, Korean families, and curious neighbors, without paying downtown Toronto rent to learn it.

Then comes the question every Korean export has to answer. Keep the cooking recognizable, or shave it down to what a hotel kitchen already plates comfortably. Local sauce production and packaged meals built for North American tastes pull one way. A short Korean-Chinese menu with Paik’s name above it pulls the other. He has argued for years that Korean sauces can work inside somebody else’s restaurant. A room carrying his brand has the harder job, because it has to taste like the reason the name travels at all.

Most of the file is still blank. No brand, no date, no address, and no list of the hotels that might follow. The Canadian grocery partners were not named, and neither was the American manufacturer. What exists today is a signed page, a Markham dining room, and a sign nobody has printed yet.