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When Maria Khursheed tried soup dumplings for the first time at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Beijing, China, she did not think it would leave a lasting impression. “The soup inside the dumplings just exploded in my mouth and I remember thinking: ‘what is happening? Who thought of making this?’” Years later, she knew she wanted to bring food experiences from her travels, primarily to other Asian countries, back to Karachi and a restaurant called Basic was born.

The highly curated menu consisted of six to seven items. “I wanted to start with a small menu, so everything could be good.” There was Vietnamese Pho, a dish with broth, thinly sliced meat and rice noodles, steamed bao buns which had Korean fried chicken, and iced tea fashioned out of a Thai Milk Tea recipe. There was also a Thai Papaya Salad, Mexican Hot Chocolate and Vietnamese Iced Coffee.

In 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing and people were not familiar with the concept of baos and pho yet, you could have said the business was ahead of its time. However, 2023 was the year that changed everything.

In the heart of Karachi, a food street at Sharfabad comes alive at 8pm. You see food carts lining the street amidst bustling traffic. Makeshift seating arrangements are situated in front of the carts where families try to cram in with their food. The food street serves dosas and khausuey and, at the nearby restaurants, you could also find biryani, but it’s the stalls serving dumplings and ramen that have the longest queues and have taken social media by storm.

Rabia Maqsood, who owns one of the popular food carts at Sharfabad, Cucina Mista, says her interest in other Asian cuisines was piqued because of mukbang videos she watched every night before sleeping. Mukbangs are when people consume copious amounts of food on camera while interacting with viewers.

“The mukbang videos would mostly have Korean or Vietnamese food. Watching people eat rice cakes and noodles made me also want to have it,” says Maqsood. “Every time I traveled for Umrah or Hajj, I would try to find Korean grocery stores to search for ingredients.”

Mukbang videos, spicy noodle challenges on social media and K-dramas have created a widespread curiosity for Asian food, particularly Korean food. The connection is quite visible when you walk into a homely restaurant in Karachi called Dong Bunsik, run by a husband and wife duo from South Korea. In addition to their dining space, you see a room that is adorned with posters of K-pop celebrities and there are photo props for people who would like to take photos of themselves with the posters.

On social media, you realise the keen interest in Korean pop culture and food is not just specific to Pakistan. Bibimbap — a Korean dish — was the most searched for recipe on Google this year globally.

“At the end of the day, it is an exchange of information,” says Kinza Jafri, owner of a newly-opened Asian restaurant called Kiki’s Cafe. “I see a lot of kids bringing their parents now to try new cuisines. We had a customer bring in her father to try our pho for the first time and she really talked him through what to expect.”

Basic’s Khursheed echoes this sentiment. “We had a woman in her 80s come in yesterday who wanted to try the food she sees in Korean dramas. Even though our pho is actually a Vietnamese recipe, she thought it was still similar to what she had seen in the dramas and she really enjoyed it.”

While Korean fried chicken as an appetiser has existed in menus in Karachi for many years, the increased awareness of the cuisine through media has also led to people being curious about more specific food items.

Maliha Rao, who is an avid K-drama fan, discovered the cuisine while watching a Korean show called Let’s Eat. “The way they show food is very wholesome and creates temptation.”

Rao took a particular fascination to kimchi — a traditional Korean sideline which consists of fermented vegetables — and it led her to eventually recreating the recipe and adding it to her home-based business called OhMami, which also primarily offers products with Asian fusion recipes.

The popularity of hotpot — which we highlighted as the dominant food trend of 2022 — has also created an understanding of trying broth-based dishes and ingredients that people wouldn’t have tried before, like bok choy, different varieties of mushrooms, tofu and so on. It has led to people being more open to trying hotpot-adjacent dishes, like Korean BBQ, dumplings, ramen and so on.

“Korean food is chatpata [spicy] but sometimes the use of lemongrass or the combination of sweet and savoury flavours in a dish can take you by surprise,” Jafri of Kiki’s Cafe says. “However, it is still very palatable.”

While new recipes, primarily of an Asian fusion profile are currently sought after, a few years ago things were different.

“In 2015, when we were opening Chop Chop Wok, the understanding of Asian food mostly revolved around desi Chinese food, which was known to be made with a lot of ketchup,” says Umair Anjum, owner of Chop Chop Wok. “Everyone said our menu wouldn’t work. Desi Chinese is what people want.”

Anjum says he wanted to offer more individual-sized portions because everytime he ordered Chinese food at home there would be lots of leftovers. That’s how the now-popular three-step wok came about. On its menu the restaurant offered Thai, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Pan Asian flavours as options for the three-step wok.

However, one thing about the approach that Chop Chop Wok took to doing a Pan Asian menu was how it did not want to be rigid with keeping the recipes authentic.

“When you go to my Tipu Sultan outlet, you will see people coming in in rickshaws, Land Cruisers and bikes. It’s good to have a niche but at the end of the day ‘niche se nahi hota hai’ [a niche isn’t what runs a business]. You need to understand the market you are operating in,” explains Anjum.

While the restaurant now has popular Asian food items like pad Thai, chilli chicken ramen, nasi goreng, Korean fried chicken and Beijing chilli beef, it has tweaked the recipes to make them closer to what people in Pakistan are already familiar with.

Anjum says people don’t like the smell of fish sauce too much, which is heavily used in authentic recipes. “We can’t keep a board explaining how we use fish sauce and it’s not the meat that is smelling, so we tweak the recipe,” he explains.

Currently, Chop Chop Wok has outlets in Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi and is one of the biggest Pan Asian food chains in Pakistan.

With newer and relatively smaller establishments, the focus is still on maintaining authenticity.

“When food businesses here serve mandi (a Middle Eastern meat and rice dish), they have to tweak it to make it spicy to suit local palates,” explains Cucina Mista’s Maqsood. “With Korean food, you don’t have to do that. It is already cooked in a variety of spices and the broth looks red and inviting — instead of looking pale.”

Keeping recipes authentic is the only way to stand out, she says.

The offerings she currently has on her food cart’s menu include tteokbokki (Korean rice cakes), steamed dumplings and hotpot inspired noodle bowls amongst others.

Khursheed also emphasises on the need to keep the recipes authentic. “I don’t want the recipes to be awaami [plebeian]. I would not spice them up unnecessarily,” she adds. “However, one thing we do at Basic is we keep adding things to the menu that have broader appeal while still staying true to the concept of Asian food.”

In recent times, the menu at Basic has been expanded to include chicken pho, a Korean fried chicken bao and patatas bravas — “people kept asking us to add fries”.

Under a video a Karachi-based blogger has made covering Korean food in Karachi, a person chides in the comments, “learn to pronounce tteokbokki correctly.” While the cuisine and flavours may be relatively new to Karachi, it has already been embraced as its very own.

It is no surprise then that the Korean Fried Chicken is the best-selling item at Chop Chop Wok. “I can’t ever think of taking it off the menu or even tweaking the recipe,” says the owner. “It is so popular I have often wondered if I can sell it in buckets — like KFC’s fried chicken.”

With the food trend only starting to pick up momentum, we see it strengthening its foothold even further next year. Jafri says, “It is something you try once and think, I need this to be a part of my life now.”