Feature

GAON brings Korean comfort food built on slow soups to Eastland Avenue

GAON Korean Comfort Food soft opened October 15 on Eastland Avenue, with a menu built around a 48-hour broth, house kimchi, braised short ribs and stone-bowl bibimbap.

By Up Next Nashville · Updated Oct 28, 2026

East Nashville has a Korean kitchen built on soup. GAON Korean Comfort Food soft opened on Thursday, October 15, at 1896 Eastland Ave, and a week in, the replies under its menu post are already asking for dishes by name: the seolleongtang, the kimchi stew. That is not how people talk about a restaurant they are merely curious about.

The idea

"Rooted in culture" is the line GAON puts on itself, and the menu backs it up. Owner Minah Kim is cooking comfort food in the plain sense: the dishes Korean families actually eat at home, with soup at the center of the table. The seolleongtang, the milky beef soup, starts with a broth the kitchen simmers slowly for 48 hours. Kimchi jjigae and yukgaejang, the spicy shredded beef soup, sit alongside it, and the kimchi is made in house. The menu is organized the way the kitchen thinks about a meal: something from the pot, something from the grill, something in a bowl.

What to order

First visit, keep it simple: the seolleongtang and the kimchi jeon will tell you what this kitchen is about. The menu's specials are suyuk, a platter of boiled beef with sides, LA galbi from the grill, and galbijjim, short ribs braised down until they give. Appetizers run to jeon, the savory pancakes in kimchi and potato versions, and dumplings. The one rice dish is dolsot bibimbap, mixed in its hot stone bowl, and the noodles are makguksu, buckwheat noodles dressed with perilla oil or mixed spicy in the bibim style. It is a short menu, and it knows exactly what it is.

Already finding its people

The kitchen has an Austin chapter: the chef cooked in a Korean barbecue restaurant there before Nashville, a detail one of the first visitors through the door was quick to pass along. That first visit, shared on GAON's own page this week, worked through a full table: kimchi jeon, potato pancake, the stone-bowl bibimbap, short rib soup, the boiled beef platter and the grilled short ribs, with the house kimchi and radish sides. The comments under the menu post tell the same story from the neighborhood's side, with east siders asking, in so many words, how soon they can get Korean soups and stews on this side of the river.

Where it stands

The room was a working kitchen before it was GAON's, and the refit behind the opening ran about $49,000, centered on a new hood and kitchen equipment, the unglamorous machinery a soup kitchen depends on. The soft opening is the opening for now: no separate grand opening date has been announced. Hours are Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday, 11 AM to 9 PM, and Friday and Saturday, 11 AM to 10 PM; the kitchen is closed on Mondays. Go soon, go patient, and order the soup.

GAON Korean Comfort Food is at 1896 Eastland Ave in East Nashville, with takeout alongside the dining room. Its menu and updates are on Instagram at @gaonnashville.

Read more

• GAON's menu post on Instagram - the full menu, posted the day before the soft opening.
• Noshing in Nashville: a first visit to GAON - a first table, worked through on camera.
• GAON on Instagram