What happens when South Korean boyband BTS, one of the biggest musical acts in the world, comes to your restaurant and you don’t have the dish they wanted to try?

“I said that if they came back, I’ll make it for them,” laughs Noah Yoo, owner of Ssangkye Braised Chicken House in Thornhill, just off the main strip of Korean bars and restaurants that run along Yonge Street between Sheppard and Steeles Aves.

One of the group’s members, V, saw a picture of bo ssam (sliced pork belly) on the restaurant’s Instagram page and wanted to order it. Unfortunately, as Yoo explained to the singer, it was actually made for a staff meal. Nevertheless, needing to fuel up for a series of sold-out shows, the band ordered everything from the restaurant’s small menu, which specializes in jjimdak, a regional South Korean specialty chicken and vegetables braised in a rich soy sauce and mixed with glass noodles and dumplings.

While the star-studded luncheon happened back in September when BTS was performing in Hamilton, the rest of the world only found out about it over the last weeks when Run BTS!, a weekly streaming show chronicling the band’s hijinks and travels, released an episode revolving around the band’s visit to Toronto. Other highlights in the episode: the band seeing Niagara Falls for the first time and finding their way around a Fresh Co. in Barrie.

Yoo says fans have since been requesting the BTS table (heads up: it’s the two tables of four in the back corner) and asking specifically which member sat where and what they ordered.

For those who aren’t tuned into the current state of pop culture, BTS, aka the Bangtan Boys, is a seven-member South Korean boyband that came on to the music scene in 2013. Since then, the band has a global fan base that rivals—or surpasses—those of Backstreet Boys or *NSYNC’s in their heydays thanks to the advent of YouTube spreading their addictive tunes (“Idol” is one of the newer bops I recommend for new listeners).

Already a massive hit in Asia, BTS debuted on American television during the 2017 American Music Awards and solidified a new era of K-Pop dominance in North America. They performed on Saturday Night Live last month (becoming the first Korean act to do so), they were the most tweeted about celebrities in the US in 2018, and broke YouTube’s record for most views in 24 hours with 74.6 million views with their latest music video.

So how did the band end up at a Thornhill plaza at the corner of Steeles Ave. and Yonge St. on a quiet weekday afternoon?

“I think V was on Instagram looking up Korean restaurants in Toronto and that’s how he found us,” says Yoo, who opened the restaurant in November 2017. He remembers getting a call requesting a reservation for 35 people coming from Niagara Falls just after lunchtime that afternoon. He was expecting a tour group. When the reservation time came up, a group of black vans rolled into the parking lot.

“I thought it must be someone special in there, like Korean idols (pop star),” Yoo says. “I asked the staff if there were any Korean idols having concerts here and one of my staff said it was BTS. I know who they were but I couldn’t believe they’d be here, like, there’s no way.”

While the band and the crew took over the tiny restaurant, Yoo noticed fans trying to look in from the parking lot a few metres away. Not wanting to expose the groups’ whereabouts and cause a stampede, Yoo kept quiet about the visit.

The ARMY (what BTS’ fan base is called) probably already know this by now, but here’s what the members ate: three medium orders of jjimdak (one with the traditional soy sauce base, one with a spicy gochujang base, and one topped with cheese), steamed rice to soak up all the delicious jjimdak sauce, cans of Coke and as an appetizer, a small pizza topped with honey, garlic and plenty of mozzarella.

While jjimdak isn’t as widely known as pork bone soup, bibimbap or kimchi in Toronto, Yoo says he’s happy the dish is now getting more attention.

“If you go to university cities in Korea, you’ll see these places that serve jjimdak and are really popular with younger Koreans,” he says, adding that he learned how to make jjimdak by simply asking chefs in South Korea to teach him. “The food here is a throwback to when I was in school.”

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I ordered a small plate of black sauce jjimdak, the most basic version of the dish, which Yoo recommends getting for those who never had it before. Originating in Andong, a city in the eastern part of South Korea, jjimdak consists of chicken that’s slowly braised in a thick, sweet and salty soy-sauce along with vegetables, rice cakes (both regular and cheese-filled), chilies, glass noodles and dumplings. While the band ordered it with boneless chicken, Yoo recommends the bone-in version for more flavourful meat. It’s a comforting dish that’s meant to be shared with the table, served on a giant sizzling plate that really requires no extra sides, but for the sake of journalism, I also got the honey-garlic pizza that the band raved about.

While it’s a more recent invention, Yoo explains that it’s a popular type of Korean pizza but it’s seldom seen in Toronto. It’s heavenly: Gooey mozzarella, sweet honey mixed with savoury garlic powder and parsley flakes, a few specks of parsley and tart dried cranberries on piping hot crust. It may be personal-sized, but its sugary-sweetness and indulgent cheesiness makes this a dish better for sharing.

I’m not usually one who makes it a point to eat where famous people ate, but I’m glad that because of the band I got to try a dish or two that I didn’t know about before.

Funny enough, when Yoo was planning to open the restaurant, he thought about serving pork and beef jjimdak but his mother talked him out of it, saying that while not everyone eats pork or beef, every meat-eater enjoys chicken. But then again, his mom probably didn’t expect the biggest band in the world to come into her son’s restaurant with a hankering for pork belly.