“Everything tastes so fresh,” says Eater alum and Korean food influencer, James Park, who recently attended a dinner party with friends that had ordered from Rice Thief. Group-sized portions make Rice Thief especially popular with dinner parties. She is very serious about her craft,” he says. It uses 20-plus herbs and other seasonings that the team sources from a Korean market in Flushing, and is a laborious marination process that takes about 3-5 days to ferment. The soy marinade for the crabs is Jang’s mother’s secret. “This is my first business and it’s about dividing our talents. “It really just started out as a fun thing.” In the meantime, the trio is still figuring out how to balance both their personal relationships with work. “We never thought this would turn into a business,” says Yu. His girlfriend, who is Chinese, posted a photo of it on social media and immediately started getting requests for purchases they began to fulfill out of their Long Island City home kitchen as a team. Last fall, Jang’s mother made the soy-marinated crabs, a specialty craving of his that she didn’t serve at her former restaurant. “I will forever be indebted to the sacrifices my mother made, and wholeheartedly this is the main reason we pursued this: to share the love my mother puts into her craft and cuisine with the whole world.” “She worked so hard, like 15-hour days, so that we didn’t have to work in the restaurant and to provide us with the basic childhood she was never able to experience growing up,” says Jang, who worked in finance prior to debuting Rice Thief. It’s truly a family affair: Rice Thief collaborates with and uses the recipes of Jang’s mom, Jong Sook Jang, who previously owned a Korean restaurant, Jang Soo Chon in Richmond Hill, Staten Island until around 2012.įrom left: Haiqi Yu, Jong Sook Jang, and Richard Jang. The Rice Thief menu is set up for family-style portions, ideal for a dinner party. In addition, Rice Thief wanted to offer some non-raw dishes, such as spicy pork bone soup (gamjatang), Korean abalone congee, and homemade Korean drinks like pumpkin rice punch (shikye), all sold in larger orders meant to share. “When it’s raw, you get so much more flavor - it’s blowing up all over mukbangs right now, where you squeeze out that orange,” says Jang. In Korea, soy-marinated crabs get the nickname rice thief, the idea being the dish is so flavorful, that it steals all the rice away. Initially, they started the business under the name Crab Town to get straight to the point. “It’s so creamy, almost like uni,” agrees Yu. “There’s nothing quite like the taste of the yolk you get with raw crab,” says Jang. Rice Thief serves several Korean-style raw seafood dishes including, red Argentinian or white shrimp, abalone, and scallop, but the star is the soy-marinated crab, known as ganjang gejang along with its counter-part spicy crab yangnyeom gejang. What started as a homespun business in November of last year now operates out of Sunnyside Eats, a commercial ghost kitchen. procuring fresh crabs at the New Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx, as they do at least twice a week for their restaurant delivery service, Rice Thief. at a kitchen in Sunnyside, Queens, but Richard Jang, and his girlfriend Haiqi Yu, have already been up since 2 a.m.
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