How a Former K-Pop Star and Texas Chef Created the Perfect Southern BBQ — Smoke Point

At Heirloom Market BBQ in Atlanta, owners Jiyeon Lee and Cody Taylor serve Texas barbecue with a Korean twist. This combination has earned the restaurant a spot on the Michelin Guide and turned it into one of the busiest restaurants in the city, serving classics like brisket and dishes special to them like a hot chicken sandwich, kalbi beef rib with Korean banchan, and more.

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Credits:
Producer: Connor Reid
Directors: Connor Reid, Murilo Ferreira
Camera: Murilo Ferreira, Jay Simms
Editor: Lucy Morales Carlisle

Executive Producer: Stephen Pelletteri
Supervising Producer, Operations: Stefania Orrù
Supervising Producer, Development: Gabriella Lewis
Audience Engagement: Avery Dalal
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– You know, the style of cooking that we’re doing, Southern barbecue with a Korean pantry. We had a lot of blow back at the beginning. People would walk up and see crispy tofu, Korean sweet potatoes, cucumber radish banchan, spicy Korean pork sandwich on the special board outside

And they would go, “Whoop!” and then turn around. (Jiyeon laughs) Because the sign just says “barbecue,” right? Then they read those items, they’re like, “Where am I?”. – Is this Asian food? – Yeah. (laughs) – [Server] Can I get two chicken wings, separate, macaroni, and collard greens?

– [Cook] Did you order collards and macaroni? – [Server] I have DoorDash! – So right here in this box is something we marinate every Monday, that we call the kalbi beef rib. We’ve been doing it since about 2012. So we have this very special beef rib, very limited, 72 hour marinated kalbi beef rib with an array of banchan,

Because we think that beef rib is so fatty, so unctuous, that that’s all you really need, is just to cut the meat, eat a little banchan. You don’t need anything. We kind of choose it for you. But it’s one of our most requested items. When we took it away,

People call, people call, people call. This is basically our take on the Texas salt and pepper beef rib. Last thing we do before we leave is put these on the smoker. They usually take, 10 hours is a good strike zone for this one. – Prepping for the banchan for beef rib today. Koreans, we call “banchan” the side dishes that balance out whatever the main soup or meat. We actually adopt that idea to Heirloom. So this is our cabbage. So there’s just some red cabbage, white cabbage, and carrots, all the healthy stuff.

And we added the vinegar. It’s a rice vinegar. This is gochugaru. It’s a red chili pepper powder. Pretty staple for Korean cuisine. And we sit for at least two, three days. It develops the flavor. And as you can see, this is coleslaw, but the spicy version.

So to us, without banchan, it can’t be complete. Even when people eating pizza in Korea, they eat the Korean pickle. (laughs) – Back when I would take her places, she’s like, I mean, you’d order brisket, sausage, potato salad and there’s like one slaw.” – So I always order collard green and coleslaw.

This is banchan. (laughs) So next banchan, actually, Chef Cody invented. He stole my recipe, though. In Korea we don’t eat green tomato. So this is very southern to me and it’s really, really good. Love the crunchiness and the sweetness and acid and jalapeños. My favorite.

Adding some red radish just before we serve, actually, ’cause we don’t want wilting. Let me taste. I always taste. So crunchy. So the next banchan is a cucumber radish salad. The radish, it’s a tenderizer too. Gochugaru and garlic and some ginger, sugar, and just mix it. – [Cody] So we just got our big delivery from Buford Highway Farmers Market It’s kinda like the engine that rolls our flavor. – [Jiyeon] But they always pick the high quality, the pantry items from Korea. – If it wasn’t for them, it’s very hard to find these ingredients.

Like, one can and a family of six sometimes can last you for months. You know, like, this big. We go through four or five of these a week just making barbecue sauce and our rubs. I mean, we’re a very small restaurant, a roadside shack, as you will.

But we go through more gochujang than any Korean restaurant. But we go through about four or five of these cans a week just making barbecue sauce and our rubs. Yeah, we know we go through the most because- – That’s what they say. – That’s what they say. They think it’s crazy.

Now, these are spare ribs. – I love spare ribs. It’s more meat. – A little more fat. I mean, the fat’s the flavor, and it balances it well with all our kimchis. – Now, first time I tried to peel the film back there, it was pretty hard.

So I kind of figured out with chopsticks. I’m small, right? I don’t have the strength. When I trim the ribs, so I use chopstick, metal chopstick, and it works like a surgery. So you kind of go through here. Maybe some pit masters will laugh at me, but this kinda works.

So I lift it and then peel like, “Ta-da!” (laughs) And he saw that like, “Well (laughs) that works.” – There you go. So after we peel the spare ribs, what we do is we just take a little bit of our gochujang with what we call “Georgia rub” here

And kind of season very little in the back. That’s just really, just help catching the smoke. The gochujang with the extra seasonings is such a concentrated flavor. So then you flip ’em over. You put too much, it tends to burn if the smoker’s at a higher heat. It captures the smoke,

The smoke sticks to it, it’s easier to season evenly, and it adds the flavor balance that we’re looking for to kind of go with our side items, I think. We were definitely the first ones to put gochujang on ribs. Even like, some of the barbecue writers

Say we were kind of the first ones to add full-on noticeable Asian cuisine into barbecue. I definitely know that as far as like, unless Korean Americans who were doing it at home, but as far as, like, in barbecue restaurants, we were the first. It doesn’t necessarily matter,

But it’s almost like our all purpose seasoning. Where as gochujang in Korea, it’s almost like their ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard combined, right? It’s like their all purpose condiment. You know, being as Southern and Texan as I am and being as traditional Korean as she is, for us to do it was more like a natural thing. It’s not like we sat down and made it up or had a test kitchen. We literally brought the ingredients from our house

And just started doing it. Right before we load ’em, we’ll add a little bit of black pepper, just a little bit extra, and hit it like this. Then we’ll load it on the smoker. – I’m making soup. Doenjang soup for injection for brisket. Doenjang is a Korean miso

And quite a amount of ginger. This soup helps the brisket tenderize, too. When you go to some authentic Korean barbecue restaurant, they give you the doenjang soup. It’s like sizzling, boiling, you know, soup and you eat with the beef or pork. Without that, to me, it’s not complete. The flavor is connected to me. I use a lot of memories through my childhood

With my grandmother and my mom and I remember the flavors and I found the connections between Southern food and Korean food a lot through the memories. Brisket is such a tough meat. It’ll help tenderize the meat and also that extra umami flavor to it.

– This is the miso injection that Chef Jiyeon made earlier. So we’re just gonna hit it with a turkey injector probably about 20 times a brisket. So, you know, it’s about an inch, inch and a half. Like that. At the same time as you see the liquids coming in and out of it,

It’s also acting as our pace for our rub. I like to inject the top end pretty heavy. I mean, you see a lot of competition cooks inject. You won’t see the big brisket guys in Texas inject because they go through so much. This is what we call our Texas rub.

But really, the main differences is salt, pepper. We add beef Dashida, tiny bit of Korean MSG. We don’t put a ton of MSG in anything, but I think the balance of the beefiness and that ingredient was really nice. We also put the gochugaru, the Korean red pepper flake,

And you’ll see quite a bit of black pepper. There’s also gonna be some cumin, a touch of granulated garlic, onion, chili powder. When I met Miguel from Valentina’s in Austin, and I saw his Smoke Point show, I was like, “Oh gosh, he’s naming, like, every ingredient that I use besides Dashida and red pepper flake.” Yeah. I was like, “Oh, I hope he doesn’t think I stole it from him.”

I mean, I started working in restaurants at a very young age, so I kind of stuck with it, went to culinary school, and I’ve been working in and around Atlanta since 2000, 2001. It’s a long time here. – Mine is a more dramatic (laughs) transition. I came from a Korea and my background,

I was first generation K-pop. 1988, my first album came out. I have four albums, very hit. There was some love and hate, so then I quit, and I moved to Atlanta in 1999. It was a huge opportunity to do something new. – She didn’t tell you

She’d made four number one albums in Korea? – I did. – Oh, okay. – I just said that! I didn’t say number one. (laughing) – She was Britney Spears of K-pop. The HM hot chicken sandwich is something that customers kept requesting me ’cause it’s been a very trendy item

Over the last five years. And I refuse to do it when it’s like, the height of its trend. I wait for it to kind of die and then I’m like, “Here’s a hot chicken sandwich.” So, you know, I worked at one of the famous fried chicken places everybody knows,

I don’t know if you want me to say “Chick-Fil-A,” back when I was in high school. But they would take all their pickle juice and marinate their chicken for the grilled chicken and I never forgot that ’cause it was just super stupid smart. So we just marinate the chicken really quick.

Chicken thighs in a pickle juice brine, 24 hours. Then we take it out of that. We marinate it in buttermilk for 24 hours. Then we put it in a KFC flour, which is a Korean fried chicken flour. Has a little bit of rice flour, a little different seasonings in it.

That way it gets a little bit crispy. One of the things that we do is, we take more fermented kimchi, where most of the kimchis we do here are one day to one week. We take that, we roast it over the fire box just to kind of dry it a little bit,

Kind of smoke, roast, toast it a little bit. So we just take it straight in here where the coals are kind of set and we just put it in. So we just set it right here in the coal box here. You kind of see, you just let it sit for a little bit.

Sometimes you can hear it, you hear a little “snap, crackle, pop.” It really just adds that little bit of kind of toasted, somewhat barbecue flavor to the sandwich. ‘Cause I always thought, when I got hot chicken, they only give you, like, one pickle or two pickles.

So we do three different kinds of pickles. Kimchi’s kind of a pickle. We do a pickled radish. We do a kimchi pickled cucumber, also, so there’s a lot of pickles, a lot of spice, it kind of balances out. – The way he does, it still has that crunchiness. Keeps the crunchiness.

I think that’s the best part. – For me, it was just a way to toast it with a different flavor, you know, directly on the fire. That’s just the thought process. It’s like, “I have live coals, why am I cooking in a pan?

I might as well come out here and cook it on the coals.” – Cody understands Korean flavor really good. And we hung out too long. (both laugh) So he really became very creative, but it makes sense. – When you go to the Korean barbecue that has a flat top tilted

And all the pork fat runs from the top and then the kimchi at the bottom just gets kind of crispy and fried, I’ll wait for that. And that’s kind of what I was shooting for with that kimchi. I like the color a little bit more like this.

You see, you can smell it a little bit too. Smell a little bit of that toasted kimchi, charcoal, kind of that, it’s burning pepper, also. The gochugaru, you’ll see, we use almost like people use black pepper in Texas or white pepper in different cuisines.

It takes a little bit of that sauerkraut outta the kimchi. But also you kind of get the crunch. You still get, it becomes like a different pickle. So here we’re gonna make our hot chicken liquid powder spice. I gotta be really careful with this. You don’t wanna touch your face.

So when I actually make the seasoning a lot, I kind of do it with no wind in a little room with a mask and sunglasses on. So we make this every day. In Nashville terms, it’s a very solid hot. It’s not that extra hot, that “skip over” hot. The gochugaru’s in here.

The gochujang and the sriracha kind of create a paste that coats it really well. So this is the old secret that started at Prince’s, which is in Nashville. I mean, they hit it with hot oil. So that’s something we invented. We put a lot of love into our hot chicken sandwich. Then we taste it. It’s good. It’s hot. It’s good, though. It’s gotta be hot, right? So we fry the chicken to order, we toss it in a brown butter gochujang ghost pepper seasoning, cayenne,

Kind of hot chicken baste. Put it on a local TGM bun, serve it with pickled radish, cucumber kimchi, kimchi mayo. So for service today, we’re basically pulling the last of our ribs off. We’re pulling the last two racks of the kalbi marinaded beef ribs and our gochujang marinaded spare ribs. We touch it right at the end, right when they come off. Just kind of a lacquer before we wrap ’em.

Hit it with a little bit of KB sauce, is what we call it. It’s our Korean barbecue sauce. So these are also the last two kalbi marinated beef ribs. Yeah, this is the final ribs to go with the banchan plate. It’s about to be 11 o’clock. It’s always a nerve-wracking time, about to open up the doors. Big rushes coming, catering is going out. Time to get inside. – Macaroni tres veces, coleslaw con frijol. – When this place gets cranking and rolling, it’s kind of like the craziest little game of Tetris, you know? I mean, for me, I always wanted to be a roadside barbecue shack with some touch. I refer to us as the barbecue shack down by the river, if you know Chris Farley,

’cause we’re right next to the Chattahoochee and we never moved on to bigger, easier pastures. We always kind of stayed. We stayed here ’cause we didn’t wanna open up multiples, ’cause we always wanted to be small. – And to me, when customers order the brisket with some banchan

Instead of French fries or something, that make me happy, you know. The way the eating barbecue or anything, when they find out that balance, that make me really happy. That’s what it’s all about for Heirloom, I think.