What It Will Take for Uri-sul to Become the Next Trend
One of the recent drink trends at meat restaurants is the highball. That prompted the question behind this nanrohoe: could the next trend be a drink built out of Korean liquor? Highballs are usually made with whisky as the base and topped with sparkling water or a soda, and even a mid-sized restaurant can move up to a hundred glasses in a day. Drinking highballs at a grill house is itself a fairly recent habit — so the group turned to the work of designing the next such habit around Uri-sul.
The first ideas on the table were about somaek, already widely enjoyed — how it might evolve, and how far it could be diversified. From there, the conversation moved to which drinks and beverages Korean restaurants and Korean-style grill houses spreading around the world could easily put on their own menus. There are cocktails, if you look across the world, that are culturally tied to specific places; if Korea could name a signature cocktail of its own, that alone would give people looking to build a Korean restaurant business a real platform to grow from. The room took the question seriously.
Lim Jae-jin, head bartender and owner of Le Chamber, shared a study of the current spirits landscape, and Cho Seo-hyung, owner of Euljiro Boseok, spoke about the food that would pair with each — measuring, together, how far a Hansik business might carry.
