Gunmoo Kim came to Ireland 16 years ago because it was the farthest place from South Korea he could find on a map.
From working holiday to culinary degree
Kim arrived in Ireland from South Korea in 2010, aged 23, fresh off mandatory military service. His English was poor, and the only job he could find was as a kitchen porter at Kimchi Hophouse, a Korean restaurant in Dublin.
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Kim extended his visa, moved up to waiting tables, and discovered he loved hospitality. Seeing an opportunity, he returned to Korea to explain his plan to his parents. They weren’t keen, but the founder came back anyway and enrolled in the culinary entrepreneurship degree at Dublin Institute of Technology.
His education took him through Pearl Brasserie, where he worked in positions from sommelier to chef de rang, and then to New York for a semester. There, he worked at Danji, the Korean restaurant run by acclaimed chef Hooni Kim, learning about running a good business at scale.
That experience shaped how he approaches his own operation today. Hooni Kim’s cookbook sits among the collection at Space Jaru, the restaurant Kim opened on Meath Street in 2023.
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Starting Jaru with a €25,000 grant
Back in Dublin for his final year, the founder spent six to eight months developing his kimchi recipe as part of a product development module. The business plan and research he wrote up for that project helped him win Enterprise Ireland’s high-potential startup grant through the New Frontier programme, giving him around €25,000 in seed money.
Jaru launched with lunchtime markets around Dublin city centre. Operating out of his home at first, he was serving about 1,000 Korean BBQ rice bowls a week across eight markets. It was busy, but it validated the business idea.
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In 2017, he went through the SuperValu Food Academy programme to get the kimchi shelf-ready. Store managers were a hard sell at first — nobody knew what kimchi was, and convincing them to stock pickled cabbage took free samples and a promise not to come back if it didn’t sell.
Within weeks, they were calling for more. Jaru kimchi started in three SuperValu stores, grew to 20, then hit 200 stores two years ago. A logistics issue last year pulled that number back temporarily.
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