Baek Jong-won

Ask anyone in South Korea to name the person who taught the country how to cook dinner, and the answer comes back with startling speed. Baek Jong-won has spent three decades doing two things at once: running one of the largest restaurant groups in the country, and standing in front of a camera explaining, in a warm Chungcheong accent and with almost no fuss at all, how to get a pot of stew right. He is not a fine-dining perfectionist and he has never pretended to be. His whole appeal rests on the opposite promise, that good food is a matter of technique you can actually learn, ingredients you can actually buy, and a price you can actually pay.

That combination has made him one of the most recognisable faces in Korean food. He built Theborn Korea from a single Seoul restaurant into a group of roughly twenty-five brands and something close to 2,900 outlets, took it public on the KOSPI in November 2024, and along the way became the anchor of a run of hit cooking shows. When Netflix launched Culinary Class Wars in 2024 and the series became a worldwide talking point, it was Baek sitting opposite Korea’s only three-Michelin-star chef, tasting anonymously behind a screen and reminding a global audience that a bowl of noodles can be judged just as seriously as a tasting menu.

TL;DR

• Born 4 September 1966 in Yesan County, South Chungcheong Province, South Korea.
• Opened his first restaurant in the Gangnam district of Seoul in 1993 and founded Theborn Korea the following year.
• Theborn Korea now runs around twenty-five brands and close to 2,900 outlets, among them Saemaul Sikdang, Hongkong Banjum, Paik’s Coffee and Bornga.
• Theborn Korea listed on the KOSPI on 6 November 2024, the company’s thirtieth-anniversary year.
• Host of Baek Jong-won’s Top 3 Chef King, Baek Jong-won’s Food Truck and Baek Jong-won’s Alley Restaurant, and a judge on Netflix’s Culinary Class Wars.
• Led the revival of Yesan Market in his home county, which reopened in January 2023.
• Married to actress So Yoo-jin since 2013; the couple have three children.

Baek Jong-won key facts

Baek Jong-won: career timeline

From a Yesan childhood to a Gangnam dining room

Yesan County sits in South Chungcheong Province, a couple of hours south of Seoul, and it is farming country: apples, rice, cattle, a traditional market that has stood in the town centre for generations. Baek Jong-won was born there on 4 September 1966, and by every account he was obsessed with food long before anyone thought of it as a career path. He has described a household where meals were discussed rather than simply eaten, and a father with famously particular tastes who set an unusually high bar for what came out of the kitchen.

The childhood stories he tells are small and very specific, which is part of why they stick. Given a packet of plain biscuits as a primary school pupil, he could not simply eat them; he fried them in butter and dusted them with sugar to see whether he could improve on the original. That instinct, the refusal to accept a thing as it arrives, runs through everything he has done since.

The hamburger experiments that started everything

The story he returns to most often involves his father coming home from business trips with ten hamburgers at a time. Rather than eating them as they were, the young Baek took them apart and rebuilt them, testing what happened if the sauce changed, if the patty was reheated differently, if something was added or taken away. He has pointed to that stretch of trial and error as the moment cooking stopped being a pleasure and became a method.

He went to Seoul High School and then to Yonsei University, where he read social welfare rather than anything culinary. The formal training never happened, and he has never hidden it. What he brought instead was an unglamorous, almost engineering-minded attention to how a dish is actually assembled and how much it actually costs, which turned out to be the more useful education. In 1993, still in his twenties, he opened his first restaurant in the Gangnam district of Seoul. A year later he founded the company that would become Theborn Korea.

Theborn Korea and the art of the affordable menu

Theborn Korea is not built on scarcity. It is built on the opposite idea: take dishes people already love, work out how to make them consistently at a price that does not make anyone hesitate, and then repeat that hundreds of times over. The group’s portfolio covers Korean grills, Korean-Chinese noodle houses, pork cutlet counters, pizza, dessert and coffee, and it has grown to roughly twenty-five brands running close to 2,900 outlets.

The names are familiar to anyone who has walked a Korean high street. Saemaul Sikdang handles the grilled meat and stew end. Hongkong Banjum covers jjajangmyeon and jjamppong, the Korean-Chinese staples. Paik’s Coffee, known at home as Paik Dabang, sells large drinks at small prices and became one of the most visible value coffee chains in the country. Bornga carries the barbecue offer, including abroad, and Paik’s Noodle, Paik’s Bibim and Hanshin Pocha fill in the gaps. Overseas expansion started early, with several of the brands landing in Singapore as far back as 2012 and others operating in the United States.

Thirty years, then a stock market debut

A public listing had been on the agenda since 2018, and was shelved when the pandemic arrived. The company returned to it to mark its thirtieth anniversary, and on 6 November 2024 Theborn Korea began trading on the KOSPI. Shares were priced at 34,000 won in the offering, opened at 46,350 won, and touched 64,500 won during the first session. The float raised roughly 73 million US dollars and valued the group at around 492 billion won.

It was an unusual moment in Korean business, because the company being valued was inseparable from a man most of the country had watched cook on television. Very few restaurant groups anywhere carry that kind of recognition into a listing.

The television years

Baek arrived on Korean television at exactly the right time. Cooking programmes were taking over the schedules in the mid-2010s, and he offered something the polished chef-presenters did not: a slightly rumpled restaurateur who spoke plainly, cooked fast, and never suggested the viewer needed better equipment. Baek Jong-won’s Top 3 Chef King ran from 2015 to 2017 and made him a household name. Baek Jong-won’s Food Truck followed in 2017, coaching struggling street vendors through their menus and their margins.

Baek Jong-won’s Alley Restaurant, which ran from 2018 to 2021, took the same idea into small neighbourhood businesses and became one of the most-discussed shows on Korean television. Then came the Netflix original Baek Spirit in 2021, a series about Korean drinking culture, and The Backpacker Chef on tvN from 2022, in which he and three companions carried their kitchen on their backs and cooked for large groups in the open air. More recently he appeared in the MBC series Chef in Antarctica, which began broadcasting in November 2025.

Culinary Class Wars and a global audience

The show that carried him beyond Korea was Culinary Class Wars. Launched by Netflix in 2024, it pitted a hundred lesser-known cooks against twenty established names, and installed two judges: Baek, representing the mass-market palate and thirty years of restaurant economics, and Anh Sung-jae, the only chef in Korea holding three Michelin stars. The contrast between them was the format engine, and it worked. The series became one of the most watched non-English titles on the service and turned several contestants into stars overnight.

A second season followed, premiering on 16 December 2025 and running weekly until the finale on 13 January 2026, with both judges returning. Alongside the broadcast work he has built one of the largest food channels on Korean YouTube, with well over six million subscribers and more than a billion views, where the format is stripped back to a counter, a pan and a recipe explained start to finish. After a break of about a year, he resumed uploading to the channel in June 2026.

Yesan Market and the hometown project

The project that may outlast the television work is the one he took on at home. In 2018 Theborn Korea signed an agreement with Yesan County to revive the old town centre around its traditional market, a place that had been slowly emptying out for years. Baek put substantial money and, more importantly, substantial operational attention into it: new dishes built around local produce, including an apple pancake and spring onion oil noodles, redesigned shopfronts and signage, retrained vendors, and a food hall arrangement that gave visitors a reason to linger.

Yesan Market reopened in January 2023 and the response was immediate. It drew about 180,000 visitors in its first two months, and cumulative visits have since passed ten million, turning a quiet county town into a genuine day-trip destination. The wider Yesan effort has since extended into drink: through Yesan Doga, an agricultural corporation affiliated with Theborn Korea, he partnered with Jin of BTS on a liquor brand called Igin, announced in December 2024 and led by an apple gin distilled at 40 per cent from Korean rice and apples.

Restaurants

Awards and honours

Watch Baek Jong-won

See Baek in action in this video.

Signature dishes

His signature is less a single plate than a way of cooking, the category Koreans call jip-bap, or home food. The recipes that made his name are the ones already in every household: kimchi jjigae built on properly rendered pork fat, gochujang jjigae with the paste bloomed in oil before the water goes in, doenjang stew, budae jjigae, a fast jjajangmyeon, fried rice that uses up what is in the fridge. Korean pork runs through much of it, and he has been a long-standing public advocate for it. What sets his versions apart is the insistence on explaining why each step exists, so the cook can adjust rather than simply obey. On the restaurant side, the dishes most associated with him are the Saemaul Sikdang grilled pork and its seven-minute kimchi jjigae, the Hongkong Banjum noodles, and the Yesan Market menu he devised for his home county, where apple pancakes and spring onion oil noodles now pull in day-trippers by the coachload.

Cookbooks

Baek is the author of books including There is a Restaurant Secret to Earning Money, Baek Jong-won’s Secret Cooking Recipes, A Restaurant that Always Succeeds, Baek Jong-won’s Meat, 52 Home-cooked Food Recipes Recommended by Baek Jong-won, Baek Jong-won’s Managing Story.

Personal life

Baek married the actress So Yoo-jin on 19 January 2013. The couple have three children: a son born in April 2014, a daughter born in September 2015 and a second daughter born in February 2018. He is a Yesan native who has kept an unusually close working relationship with his home county, and although he studied social welfare at Yonsei University rather than cooking, that background sits oddly well with the shape his career has taken, given how much of it has been spent helping small operators fix their businesses. Off camera he is known for an appetite for research trips, eating his way through regional markets and foreign cities and bringing the findings back into his menus.

Baek in context

Baek Jong-won is one of many chefs and food personalities profiled on Pickup Table 4, alongside Edward Lee and Kristen Kish.

Follow Baek Jong-won

Baek Jong-won — official · Instagram

Baek Jong-won FAQ

Who is Baek Jong-won?
He is a South Korean chef, restaurateur and television host, born on 4 September 1966 in Yesan County. He founded Theborn Korea in 1994 and is best known internationally as a judge on the Netflix series Culinary Class Wars.

What restaurants does Baek Jong-won own?
Through Theborn Korea he runs roughly twenty-five brands and close to 2,900 outlets, including Saemaul Sikdang, Hongkong Banjum, Bornga, Paik’s Noodle, Hanshin Pocha and the coffee chain Paik’s Coffee.

Is Baek Jong-won a trained chef?
He has no formal culinary training. He studied social welfare at Yonsei University and learned to cook through years of experimenting at home and then running restaurants, which is a large part of why his recipes are pitched at ordinary home cooks.

Who is Baek Jong-won married to?
He married the actress So Yoo-jin in January 2013. They have three children.

What is the Yesan Market project?
It is a joint revival scheme between Theborn Korea and Yesan County, agreed in 2018, that rebuilt the traditional market in his home town. It reopened in January 2023 and cumulative visits have since passed ten million.

Where can I watch Baek Jong-won?
His own YouTube channel carries hundreds of recipe videos and has more than six million subscribers, and Culinary Class Wars, in which he appears as a judge, streams on Netflix.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia, The Korea Herald, The Korea Times, Netflix, Theborn Korea.