SILVERDALE — Peter Yoon always has plenty of ideas for new restaurants.
So when contacted by the landlord who was seeking tenants to rent an empty space next to the 56-year-old’s ramen and island barbeque restaurant, Peter’s Kitchen, Yoon was ready. Now, he’s opened a food hall with several in-house kitchens, so many of his thoughts could be realized at the same time.
Opened in July in a shopping center just off Silverdale Way at NW Myhre Road, between Mattress Firm and Peter’s Kitchen, Pop Up Kitchen is a restaurant made up by four brands: APPA’S for Korean comfort food, pa•su•ta for Japanese creative pasta, DONDON for Japanese rice bowl and curry bowl, and boba buddies for milk tea, ice tea, slush and smoothies.
In the food hall, guests can order all types of Asian cuisine and beverages based on their preferences and enjoy the food in a common dining area. That’s what the Korean American family wants their guests to experience in the restaurant, said Peter’s daughter Nina, who runs Pop Up with her brother, Patrick.
“We’ve created this food hall, so people can come together and just enjoy different foods and have a good time,” Nina said.
Peter came up with the name “pop up” based on a 2020 Korean TV drama “Mystic Pop-up Bar.” Now a Bremerton resident, Peter had lived in Guam for some years in his childhood and had moved to many places in the United States and worked in different restaurants. He came to Bainbridge Island in 2010 and then to Bremerton in 2015, according to Patrick.
Before opening Peter’s Kitchen in 2020, Peter ran a Filipino restaurant, Gusto Mo, between 2018 and 2019, and once co-owned and sold the nearby Japanese restaurant Jo:a.
According to Patrick and Nina, Peter loves cooking and that passion and talent were witnessed since he was a child.
“Growing up, he would always cook for her (Peter’s mother),” Patrick said, recalling stories his grandmother told him. “She was always working, so after school, he would come home and cook for her. And suppose he was very good at it.”
Pop-up specials express staff’s art of cooking
In Pop Up, the Yoon family designs the menus of the kitchens and offers pop-up specials to give their in-house chefs opportunities to express the chefs’ art of cooking, Patrick said. The pop-up specials ensure that the chefs’ ideas can be incorporated besides those coming from the owners, said Nina.
For example, the chef of pa•su•ta, Jackie Chen, designed a Chuka Geki Kara Tori Pasta as his special. Geki Kara means super spicy in Japanese, so this special is a spicy creamy chicken pasta topped with tingly Sichuanese peppercorn and seasoned lotus roots.
The spicy flavor generated by the peppercorn, similar to the “mala” flavor in Chinese cuisine, is rare in the area and Chen wants to introduce that to the customers through his pasta, the chef said.
“In a lot of Asian flavors, there’s a lot of depth of flavor that I’d like to show through my dishes,” said Chen, who used to work at Peter’s Kitchen and got hired at Pop Up when hearing that Peter was opening a new restaurant.
“We want to be able to give people that kind of platform,” Patrick said. “Maybe we might not have their food (added) to the menu, but we’ll let them do it again or come up with something new.”
Pa•su•ta, DONDON, APPA’S and boba buddies
Pa•su•ta is the Japanese pronunciation of pasta. The family offers Japanese pasta in a fusion style in this kitchen. The level of fusion ranges from Napolitano pasta, a traditional Japanese ketchup-based pasta that is made up of red sauce, spaghetti, onions, green bell pepper, Kurobuta sausage and smoked bacon, to Strogatoni pasta, in which the family uses miso cream stroganoff sauce and mixes with rigatoni, wild mushrooms and braised beef.
At DONDON, the family serves rice bowls and Japanese curry bowls. Rice bowls contain customers’ choice of meat, like deep-fried chicken bites or pork loin, with eggs and onions cooked in broth. The name DONDON originated from “Donburi”, which means on top of rice in Japanese, Patrick said.
On the left of DONDON and pa•su•ta is APPA’S. In the Korean language, “appa” means father. The kitchen was named APPA’S because it contains the meaning of “this is our dad’s cooking,” said Nina.
Customers can find Korean comfort food at APPA’S, such as Korean fried chicken with homemade spicy sauce or honey sauce and radish, and Yubu Chobap, Korean-style inari sushi, which is a marinated tofu skin pocket filled with rice and topped with protein, like spicy salmon poke or bulgogi.
As for drinks, Nina created the menus of boba buddies with a variety of flavors she and her friends enjoy.
“Basically, I made everything on the menu of what I like to drink when I go out with my friends,” Nina said.
Though various combinations of fruit tea, slush, smoothie, and toppings are available on the menu, so far, the most popular drink at the store is Tiger Milk Tea, which is black milk tea with brown sugar and tapioca balls, Nina said.
Though the process of opening Pop Up was challenging, mostly due to the long waiting period of the permitting process, it is rewarding to see the outcomes, Nina and Patrick said.
“Seeing all the customers happy, eating the food, enjoying the food, and finding different cuisines they probably never tried before, I think that’s probably the most rewarding part at all,” Nina said.
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Peter’s Kitchen’s owner opens Pop Up Kitchen in Silverdale