Kansas City has a history of turning food trucks into brick-and-mortar restaurants. Port Fonda, TC’s Fully Loaded, Mattie’s Foods and Pigwich are just a few of the beloved eateries that started off with humble mobile beginnings. Restaurants are hard to pull off, and going the food truck route is definitely less risky. GOCHEW Burger and Sandwich, founded and operated by Joohae “Chewy” Yoon, is a perfect example.
Yoon came to the United States as a South Korean exchange student in 2012 and never looked back. She started her professional life in health care but always enjoyed cooking and sharing the food of her childhood with friends and the community through various Korean organizations. Wanting to expand on that desire and looking for ways to venture into the food business, Yoon discovered the Ennovation Center, a nonprofit business incubator in Independence with a commercial kitchen available for people with ideas but not many resources, like Yoon. With the guidance of its executive director Danielle DuPree, Yoon was able to create her first pop-up, GOCHEW.
“[DuPree] was such a great help navigating what’s available, what kind of food permit licenses I needed to apply for and what I could do to start,” Yoon says. “It was like a test market.”
Yoon served Korean and American fast casual eats like smash burgers and dumplings at her first pop-up, and it was a wild success. She sold out of everything.
“Thinking back, maybe I needed that confidence to get to the next step,” Yoon says. “ I felt really taken care of by the community. It gave me an immense sense of belonging.”
But Yoon could already anticipate the challenges of the pop-up format. “It was very difficult to bring all the food from the shared kitchen to the pop-up without it going soggy,” she says. So, she set her sights on moving past the one-off pop-up and going mobile.
Yoon attended a food truck workshop at Mid-Continent Public Library, where veteran “food truckers” shared an abundance of learned lessons from their collective experiences. Hearing nightmares about food trucks unable to operate because of mechanical issues, Yoon decided to start with a trailer. “I used painter’s tape in my basement to lay out a trailer size and see where the fryer was gonna go, and then I found a company called Custom Trailer Pros in Overland Park,” Yoon says. “Then I went ahead and ordered my first food trailer. That was three years ago.”
After a few years working out of a trailer, Yoon was ready to upgrade. Although a trailer is very reliable, with fewer mechanical worries than a truck, parking it at events was always troublesome. Plus, Yoon wanted the opportunity to expand GOCHEW into other Midwest markets. So when she saw the chance to buy a truck, she took it. “I got what used to be a school bus that somebody had converted into a food truck,” she says. “I feel like it is a great choice. It’s more expensive to fix, but I feel like it’s worth it.”
Yoon has spent the past year pulling up to festivals and city events serving up a genre she calls “Korean American fast food.” Her barbecue pork sandwich, for example, is drizzled with a gochujang-infused creamy sauce, and french fries are doused with various Korean-inspired sauces and sprinkled with green onions.
About a year ago, Yoon started searching for a more permanent place to park her bus turned food mobile. “I got in touch with City Hall in Raytown when I found a property that fit our criteria,” she says. “They were so welcoming and they wanted us there. It felt great.”
Along with a concrete pad to park her truck, Yoon’s lot includes a small building where customers can enjoy their food, if they so choose, or purchase some Korean snacks and GOCHEW merch (the truck’s logo of an anime character with a burger makes for a great T-shirt graphic). Having a permanent location also allows GOCHEW to have consistent weekly hours.
Raytown might be an unexpected spot for Yoon’s black and yellow anime-decorated Korean food truck, but she’s happy to be building a bridge between Midwest palates and her Korean culture, especially with her bulgogi smash burgers. “I enjoy all the burgers—Red Robin, Five Guys, everything,” she says. “I just couldn’t find that bulgogi flavor [in KC], so I decided to make the sauces, and with the burger came fries and everything else.”
Now that Yoon has a solid location, she doesn’t want to stay put. Instead, she wants to expand and bring her unique flavors to places that may not otherwise experience Korean food. “I want to hit some more rural areas,” Yoon says. “I want to go to Buckner, Lexington, Odessa, all the places that I used to serve as a home health therapist. I think people will start enjoying the differences that they were a little bit skeptical about. The difference is good.”
