Stir Fried: Irene Yoo serves up her Korean American childhood in adult beverages

At soju-focused Orion Bar in Bushwick, New York, Irene Yoo is serving up her own Korean American drinking culture with personal riffs on Korean spirits and California childhood memories. There’s a Space SPAM cocktail served in the canned meat’s iconic container, inspired by her mom’s after-school snacks. A creamy Melona slushy harkens to Seoul summers, when glass doors sliding on an ice cream cabinet is a child’s favorite sound. The food menu is Asian-kid-stoner-munchies, featuring creatively fried Asian staples like instant ramen and the aforementioned SPAM. 

The Detroit-born, LA-raised recipe developer and creator of Brooklyn pop-up Yooeating is part of an explosion of creators in the Asian spirits space innovating what we do with traditional Asian spirits. Yoo’s 2025 book, Soju Party: How To Eat and Drink Like A Korean, is her personal celebration of South Korean drinking culture through story-driven cocktail recipes, hangover cures, and drinking food. “Even in Manhattan Koreatown, there aren’t a lot of places that are third-generation types of places. You’re either going to very American places or very Korean places. There’s less of that fusion. So I wanted to make a place where you could get a bottle of soju in Brooklyn without having to go all the way to Manhattan K-town, but also maybe you want to get a glass of wine, or a nice cocktail, try a new alcohol that sort of thing,” Yoo says.

Growing up, her mother was a dedicated home cook who made Korean staples like kimchi, banchan, and Ttoktoke from scratch. She also loved to grill fish, “specifically mackerel, croaker, pike. Which I think made her unique as a Korean mom because a lot of other Korean moms that I've since interacted with don't cook fish at home that much due to the smell.” 

Though her parents rarely drank, Yoo’s uncles were gourmet drinkers who schooled her on the best food pairings over childhood summers spent in Seoul. “They’re always like, ‘Let’s go get these seafood noodles and some magkeolli,’ or ‘Let’s get barbecue duck and soju,’” she says. 

It was homesickness for familiar flavors—and a bout of strep throat—that sparked Yoo’s career transition into food in 2020. At the time, she’d just moved to New York and was grinding as a photo producer. Exhausted and feeling chewed up by the city’s merciless pace, the only thing that could make it better was a bowl of juk (Korean rice porridge). Hailing a cab to midtown was beyond her budget, so a tearful Yoo called her mom. “(My mom) was like, ‘Then just get in a cab. It’s fine. Spend the money, don’t worry about it,’” Yoo says.

Maybe it was the comfort of hearing her mother reassure her that she was lucky—that she didn’t have to face the big city all alone—but it became one of those corporate burnout moments culminating in the realization that perhaps sharing this warm, fuzzy feeling she got from a bowl of rice porridge with others is what she really wanted to do. “I think that was a sticking point for me. It was like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m someone who really needs to have that Korean comfort food in my life,’” Yoo says.

Thus Yooeating was born in 2020, along with a YouTube channel on which Yoo shares recipes and Korean food history. Yoo also spread her culinary historian wings working for the Museum of Food and Drink, and developing recipes for outlets like Food52. “It was about exploring that comfort food that I really missed through the lens of a person finding that connective tissue and thoroughfare between all the other diasporas of New York City cuisine,” Yoo says about that time. 

Nostalgic comfort is a throughline running across all her food ventures. Yoo opted for a more casual bar when opening Orion Bar in 2024 because restaurants are “too much work, too many people,” whereas what she enjoyed about doing pop-ups was the spontaneous creativity and communal vibe. Though she’s a recipe developer, Yoo knows customers aren’t looking for “elevated food at a bar in Bushwick,” so Orion’s menu remains steadfastly unfussy—it’s exactly what you would expect a stoned Korean American kid to whip up, if they had the capacity to safely finesse a fryer while inebriated. 

For example, instant ramen—a classic Asian kid comfort food—is featured in both cheesy carbonara and budae jiggae. Orion uses different ramyun at the bar, but Yukgaejang, one of the first brands introduced to the United States in the 1980s, eaten straight from its plastic styrofoam bowl packaging, was the flavor of Yoo’s family vacations. “Any time I travel somewhere, it’s the first thing I crave,” she says. 

Another integral childhood sodium fix Yoo found herself incorporating into the menu is SPAM musubi, topped with egg, cheese, and caramelized kimchi, inspired by the afterschool snacks her mom made. “She’d just fry up SPAM slices and a little bit of flour and egg, and serve that with rice and furikake, soy sauce, and sesame oil. That’s something I craved all the time. In college, I would always really want that, but my peers were always like, ‘Ew SPAM,’” she says. “Then when I gained a little bit more confidence to cook for myself and start doing these pop-ups that was one of the first dishes I launched with.”

There’s also Tteokbokki, Korean rice cakes, coated with a magkeolli (Korean rice beer) batter and deep fried like the churros she grew up surrounded by in Southern California. “Deep-frying rice cakes was something I’d always wanted to try. It’s not something you see very often, but it’s very delicious,” Yoo says. “So I wanted to do that with a classic cream cheese dipping sauce but folded in some makgeolli to give it that fermented Korean flavor.”

Though soju is a traditional Korean spirit, how Yoo and many Asian American bartenders interpret it in cocktails is unique to a rising third-culture Asian American approach. Take Yoo’s naengmyoen martini, detailed in Soju Party, for example. This soju riff of her favorite food using beef dashida (Koren instant stock seasoning) and water kimchi spins traditional Korean ingredients into one of the greatest American inventions of the 20th Century: the martini. 

As JoySauce writer Poojah Shah has previously reported, we’re in the third-culture Asian American culinary era in which creators confidently interpret childhood ingredients through individual lenses. Previous generations struggled to first introduce Asian cuisines (think about all the Chinese restaurants owned by Southeast Asian immigrants for branding purposes), and clumsy white chef efforts at “fusion” made it a dirty word for a time (redeeming “fusion” was part of the original point of this column). Now that there’s a foundation of public knowledge and even your average La Verne, Tennessee resident enjoys Lao chili crisp, creators like Yoo are innovating food and drink with experiences from their actual life. 

“I feel like it’s really representative of who we were growing up as a generation, and specifically America’s relationship with the Asian community. Me and my peers, our generation growing up, we all very much share smelly lunch box stories or can’t cook kimchi jiggae for three days if someone is coming over…people really being like, ‘Ew, what’s that?’... We grew up straddling that dichotomy,” says Yoo. “When I was doing Yooeating I felt very singular in what I was doing, but then I realized a lot of people were on the same path. We all share these unique experiences and are now converting that to find joy and creativity in.”