Revel Will Move Its Korean Street Food to South Lake Union for a Year

To make way for a new development, Fremont’s excellent Korean street-food restaurant Revel and its adjacent bar, Quoin, will move for one year to South Lake Union. Chef-owners Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi refer to the temporary situation as a pop-up taking place in the former home of Josh Henderson’s Vestal. Revel and Quoin should make a seamless transition from Fremont to SLU in spring 2018, according to Seattle Met, before returning in 2019 to the new three-story mixed-use building at their original location in Fremont.

Revel opened in Fremont in 2010, becoming known for items like short rib dumplings and pork belly waffles. Yang and Chirchi have earned plenty of critical acclaim — including attention from the James Beard Awards — for Revel’s Fremont sibling as well, Joule, and for their modern Korean barbecue joint on Capitol Hill, Trove. And Yang is riding high on the recent release of her cookbook, My Rice Bowl: Korean Cooking Outside the Lines, an exploration of her highly personal style of Korean cooking.

Vestal closed in August along with neighboring Poulet Galore and Cantine after just a year. In March, owner Josh Henderson (of prolific Huxley Wallace Collective) had tried rebooting Vestal as a more casual spot. He said at the time that Vestal might have been a couple years early to an area that isn’t yet a destination neighborhood, along with other factors that limited the restaurant’s business. Hopefully Yang and Chirchi’s esteemed profile and Revel’s built-in following will allow them to have more success in their temporary home.