When Dennis Lee, chef of Namu Gaji, finishes work, he immediately meets up with the restaurant’s management team.

Sometimes he bikes home from the Mission with David, his youngest brother and Namu’s general manager. Sometimes he takes an Uber with his partner, Misa Arnberger, another manager. At the three-story house they all share in the Outer Sunset, they’ll find Jeff Kim, a childhood friend who manages the Namu farmers’ market stand, and middle brother Daniel, who arrived home hours before on the Facebook shuttle. Dennis’ two young daughters are a constant presence. So is a black pit bull named Shasta.

Namu Gaji, the second incarnation of a restaurant that first opened in the Richmond District in 2006, is that rare space in the Mission: a neighborhood bistro where you can get a reservation and reliably good, often stellar, food. Its burger, okonomiyaki (savory pancake) and ramyeon (Korean-style ramen) are as established in San Francisco’s culinary consciousness as Delfina’s trippa alla Fiorentina and Yank Sing’s soup dumplings. The views from the high wood counters that circle the window-wrapped dining room capture the ever-present line for Bi-Rite Creamery and, beyond, the hills of Dolores Park.

Namu isn’t a restaurant so much as a family — or perhaps it’s more appropriate to call it a clan, one that encompasses romantic partners and cooks, farmers and fellow restaurateurs.

“How many modern restaurants do you think of as a family-run business?” says Bar Tartine chef Nick Balla, who has known Dennis Lee since the two worked together 12 years ago. At Namu, “everybody pitches in. Everybody has a piece of it.”

When Namu opened, the media considered it an iconoclastic little place on the fringes of San Francisco’s chef community. In retrospect, it has become clear that the Lees’ restaurant helped set the tone for one of the most significant culinary movements to change dining in the Bay Area.

Back to Gallery The Lee brothers and their path to SF’s most... 29 1 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 3 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 4 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 5 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 6 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 7 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 8 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 9 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 10 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 11 of 29 Photo: Mohammad Gorjestani 12 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 13 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 14 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 15 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 16 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 17 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 18 of 29 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 19 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 20 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam / Special to The Chronicle 21 of 29 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 22 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 23 of 29 Photo: LANCE IVERSEN, San Francisco Chronicle 24 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 25 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 26 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 27 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle 28 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam / Special to The Chronicle 2016 29 of 29 Photo: Stephen Lam, Special to The Chronicle

























































In the past decade, more chefs here have melded formal cooking techniques with local ingredients and their own family’s culinary heritage, be it Swedish or Cantonese. Dennis Lee has been transforming his own experience into dishes for so long, pushing his ideas so far, that no hyphenated term — Korean-American, pan-Asian, farm-to-table — accurately defines what he’s doing.

As it prepares for a major expansion, Namu Gaji has matured into a place that represents what tourists and residents love most about dining in San Francisco: a restaurant that is polished without pretension, aware of both micro-trends and micro-seasons and yet never strays from a singular point of view.

All of that comes out of a childhood far from Northern California: the suburbs of Boston.

The shared trait when interviewing all three brothers at once is their direct, unflinching gaze. Dennis, the eldest, is not so much intense as intent, wasting no time on spin or prevarication. Daniel enters the conversation only when called on and delivers his answers with a small, wry smile. David opens with the broadest grin and leans in to speak, settling back only when one of his siblings is talking.

Their maternal aunt was the first to emigrate from South Korea to Boston, where she opened what may have been the first Japanese restaurant in the region. That restaurant allowed her to bring over her sisters, including the Lees’ mother, Soonyoung, each of whom worked in their siblings’ restaurants until they could open one of their own.

Soonyoung, in turn, helped her husband come to the United States. He eventually studied engineering at the University of Massachusetts, and similar to his wife’s family, sponsored his four sisters and brothers’ immigration. They all worked together at the manufacturing business he started.

Dennis was born in 1979, Daniel 1981, David 1983. The three brothers spent their early childhoods in an apartment building outside Boston in the pressure cooker of the Korean expat community, immersed in their family’s businesses and interpersonal drama, learning English only when they went to school.

“I was the Christopher Columbus of the family,” Dennis says. His parents were like a lot of immigrants, he adds: “Trust the system, trust your kids to be taken care of by the system, and (tell your kids) you need to get straight A’s and do what your teachers tell you.”

With little help from his parents, Dennis had to figure out how school bureaucracy worked, not to mention the millions of social cues that other kids would judge him on — and then teach all those skills to his brothers. The experience forged a bond of mutual reliance that mirrored their broader family’s.

It also stamped into them the roles they still play: Dennis the leader, the one who simultaneously rebels and protects; Daniel the studious one who smooths the waters; David the socially assured extrovert who benefited most from his elder brothers’ advice.

In 1990, Soonyoung Lee finally opened her own restaurant 30 minutes west of Boston, serving Japanese, Korean and Thai food. All three sons, then in their teens and early 20s, were pulled into the work, David most of all.

Yet their parents were happy to send all three sons off to college, setting them on the well-paved road to a well-paying career. Daniel and David both swore they’d never work in restaurants again.

Dennis had other ideas.

In the summer of 2006, Dennis called David with a request: Could he move to San Francisco to help operate a fleet of hot dog carts?

At the time, David had just finished his degree in sound engineering, and Daniel was in Chicago working in an engineering firm. They’d all spent a summer in San Francisco a few years before — “our last big shebang together,” David says — before their lives diverged.

Dennis had settled in San Francisco first, working at an urban street-wear company, then as a manager at Ozumo, a high-end Japanese restaurant in the Financial District. He and his then-girlfriend had two daughters. Like his parents, the former economics major wanted to start a business.

By 2006, he’d begun talking to a friend about doing something to “elevate street food,” which at that time was a novel idea. His friend, a metal worker, modified a few hot dog carts to look stylish, and Dennis bid for a city contract providing concessions in Golden Gate Park.

Somewhat to his shock, the city accepted his bid. Less surprisingly, David moved west to help.

As Happy Belly, their nascent company, ramped up, selling organic hot dogs and chicken sandwiches around the park, the Lees rented a small retail space on Balboa Street and converted it to a commercial kitchen. As they tiled the floors and hired friends of friends to build the kitchen, they realized the concession business wasn’t as lucrative as they’d hoped. Happy Belly died to give birth to Namu, which opened in December 2006.

Dennis and David decided Namu would be an izakaya with casual eats, good beer and sake, and a tuned-in vibe. Soonyoung’s kimchi was on the panchan platter and they topped their burger with pickled daikon, but the restaurant wasn’t “Korean” by any measure. The menu included grilled skirt steak, mushroom dumplings with dashi and Vietnamese spring rolls.

Namu’s food was made by and for a generation that grew up with bibimbap, Chick Fil-A sandwiches, sushi and Buffalo wings as their everyday foods, and who didn’t question the value of shopping for produce at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market. Namu became one of the places industry pros went on their nights off.

In the restaurant’s first year, Daniel flew out to visit so often that his brothers chided him that he should just stay. Daniel may not have ever wanted to work in restaurants again, he says, but he wanted to go into business with his brothers. If it was the restaurant business, well, so be it. He took on the bureaucratic aspects of running the enterprise.

The trio pursued the ideas that best captured their entrepreneurial imagination, worrying about the profit-and-loss sheets later. They opened a successful stand at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, experimented with a CSA, sold jarred kimchi, tried a barbecue restaurant in Magnolia’s Dogpatch brewery called Smokestack (that partnership dissolved in February) and, of course, started the farm.

Ten years after Namu’s improbable debut, on a hot July day, the Namu Farm is all innuendo, hinting at the produce about to gush forth. Dennis and David Lee have driven out to their plot in the Sunol Agriculture Park to fill their trunk with produce, but mostly to bring a journalist to meet Kristyn Leach, who has been overseeing the farm since she started it five years ago.

Under a grapevine-shaded cabana, Leach has arranged the day’s haul in plastic crates: sour roselle buds, gold and purple tomatoes, Korean melons that look like oversized citrons and feathery bundles of perilla leaves.

The farm started when Leach, a Korean American farmer-in-training, began selling herbs to the Lees. She told them how she was studying traditional East Asian farming methods, and soon, the restaurant put up the money for Leach to get started. She in turn began supplying Namu with vegetables, many of them grown from open-pollinated heirloom seeds from Korea or California.

Leach’s mission has become even more complex and idiosyncratic over the past five years. The approach she takes to farming builds soil fertility and helps crops resist disease by focusing on the microbial health of the soil. Instead of adding fertilizer, grasses and roots are left to decompose in the ground.

Following four years of drought, Dennis has become most excited about how the farm is flourishing with less water, and he keeps urging Leach to teach other California farmers how to better respond to climate change. With each growing season, too, the flavors of the produce become more distinctive — ever more Namu.

Rifling through the baskets for a midday snack, David says he sometimes still catches himself surprised to be the owner of a successful restaurant, not some 20-year-old kid helping his brother sell hot dogs. Young cooks sometimes ask David what it takes to become Dennis Lee. “I tell them to put their head down and work,” David says. And keep working. “Someday you’ll lift your head up, and you’ll be a chef.”

One of the things that frustrates the brothers about their media coverage is that Dennis is often described as “self-taught.” He is, in fact, one of the few well-known chefs in town who did not establish his pedigree at culinary school or by apprenticing to other chefs.

The phrase “self-taught,” David says, glosses over all the nights his brother spent poring over cookbooks or coming home from the market with a dozen fish to practice his filleting skills. Even Dennis admits to the adjective “obsessive.” David jokes about the time Dennis brought a microscope into the kitchen to make his cooks examine how different cuts changed a vegetable’s structure and flavor.

Namu Gaji, the restaurant opposite Dolores Park that the Lees moved the business into in 2012, serves some of the dishes that first made them popular. But the food has become more nuanced and assured. “As I evolved as a chef and as a restaurateur, (cooking) became more about personal development,” Dennis says, “trying to figure out what is it about food that makes me excited, or how I think a person can express themselves most effectively with food.”

A meal these days might begin with pickled heirloom squash and enoki mushrooms and end with a marshmallow-like black sesame mousse with chocolate ganache. The table might fill up with skewered lamb tsukune (meatballs) seasoned like a Turkish kabob, alongside turkey tails from BN Ranch braised adobo-style and then crisped over binchotan charcoal. Even standards like Namu’s grilled beef tongue are never quite the same as the last time you had them. The 90 varieties of produce the farm produces keeps that from happening.

This is cuisine without singular definition.

And yet journalists, and Americans in general, keep settling for the easy take. “Racial profiling,” Dennis calls it. Gaffes cling to the brothers’ skin like particularly spiky burrs. The time a magazine praised the sweet Korean chile paste on Namu’s chicken wings, which are actually modeled on what you’d get at a bar in Buffalo, N.Y. The review that called them “Zen.” It galls the Lees when non-Korean diners call their food “Korean” or when Korean Americans compare their meal to what would appear on their grandmothers’ table.

Their mother’s restaurant cooks Korean, Japanese and Thai food. In their adopted city, Cantonese barbecue joints and taquerias outnumber delis or pizzerias — and they eat at delis and pizzerias, too. They pay closer attention to the sourcing of their ingredients than most Northern California restaurants. Why are all these influences so invisible to the press?

The brothers have also had a decade to put these grievances in perspective. “I feel extreme humility and gratitude for us to be able to do what we’re doing for this long, and to continually improve on that,” Dennis says.

The Lees never do things for show, says 4505 Meats owner Ryan Farr, who has worked with the Namu clan for so long he feels like a member. “They’re doing it because they’re good people and want to feel good about what they do,” he says. “You don’t always see that in the restaurant business. There’s no ulterior motive.”

These days, Namu is preparing to expand at an almost explosive rate, allowing them to bring more of the extended family into the business as partners. Come fall, the Lees will introduce a casual spot on Divisadero that specializes in stone pot rice dishes and stews as well as fried chicken coated, in Japanese fashion, in a rice-flour batter.

Next will come a large restaurant in Jakarta: One of their investors lives in the Indonesian capital and persuaded Dennis to cook test meals there, which turned into a restaurant. Half of the restaurant will be more formal, half casual and all prepared with local ingredients. Dennis plans to spend a few months a year there.

By next spring, the Lees also hope to open Namu Noodle in Dogpatch, riffing off the popular bowls at their farmers’ market stand. In preparation for that third restaurant, they’re teaching themselves to brew makgeolli, a milky, sweet-sour rice beer, which they’ll produce in house, one of the first restaurants in America to do so.

The brothers have lived together in various configurations over the course of the past 12 years, their arrangements often transitional. In 2012, though, they found the three-story house they have settled in.

They work together, cook meals together in their off hours, go out drinking together, host whole-animal barbecues for their staff in the back yard. Dennis says they try not to bring the minutiae of work home. Instead, larger ideas about food and business flow through their conversation, the vocabulary of their attachment, just as it was for their mother and aunts.

David considers the Namu clan even larger than the house’s five residents and Dennis’ daughters. For him, it swells to include their employees, some of whom have been there for six or seven years. “It’s really important,” he says. “Anyone can be family. You don’t have to be blood.”

Dennis extends the circle even more. “It’s supposed to be a neighborhood place,” he says. “You’re not just supposed to be taking people’s money and saying, ‘Oh, nice transaction.’ When you’re treating (customers) like family, of course your staff should be family, too. It’s the only way you can extend that hospitality.”

In that family, he says, Namu is exactly what a restaurant is supposed to be.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman