Kimchi's TLV

For years, Tel Aviv had no dedicated Korean restaurant — a strange gap in a city that had otherwise eaten its way through every Asian cuisine, and stranger still given how thoroughly K-dramas and K-pop had soaked into Israeli pop culture. Kimchi’s closed that gap. It is the city’s first standing Korean restaurant, and for a lot of diners it remains the place they first tasted real bibimbap or homemade kimchi rather than a fusion approximation of it.

The kitchen belongs to Suni Kim, and her biography is part of the appeal. Born in Japan to Korean parents, she also spent time living in China before moving to Israel — a genuinely pan-Asian background that shows up on the menu. Kimchi’s began the way a lot of good small restaurants did: as a COVID-era takeaway pop-up, cooking out of a delivery kitchen when nobody could sit down anywhere. The food found an audience, and the pop-up grew into the full restaurant now on Lilienblum Street. Suni is upfront that the recipes are her mother’s home cooking — this is family Korean food, not a chef’s reinterpretation of it.

The core menu runs through the classics: bibimbap, tteokbokki, japchae glass noodles, gimbap, bulgogi, and Korean fried chicken in soy, spicy, and honey-garlic versions. Suni’s homemade kimchi — napa cabbage and cucumber — is sold by the jar as well as served at the table. Alongside the Korean dishes sits a smaller Japanese-leaning selection: ramen, udon, handmade dumplings, and taiyaki fish-shaped cakes filled with red bean, custard, or chocolate. Heat is calibrated for Israeli palates rather than pushed to full Korean intensity, though the kitchen will oblige if you ask.

The vegan range is unusually deep for the cuisine. Beyond vegan bibimbap, gimbap, ramen, dumplings, and kimchi, every fried-chicken dish on the menu can be ordered as crispy tofu instead — the same sauces, the same idea, no meat. For a kitchen built on a famously meat- and fish-heavy cuisine, that is real effort, not a token salad.

Practically: Kimchi’s sits in the City Center, on Lilienblum, an easy walk from Rothschild and the surrounding bars. At lunch it runs largely as a pickup-and-delivery kitchen with limited seating and no table service; evenings are the full sit-down experience, and reservations are taken via Ontopo. There is a business-lunch deal with a discounted appetizer platter, and family dinner sets for two or four. Delivery is available through Wolt. Follow @kimchistlv for specials and opening updates.

Address: 21 Lilienblum Street, Tel Aviv

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