Pushing the door of the Kick Café, in the center of Paris, one has the feeling of entering a gigantic candy box. Candy pink walls, white chocolate pastries disguised as lollipops, teddy-shaped shortbread, blue, green and purple cocktails, topped with whipped cream, cookie powder and cotton candy syrup… An accumulation of glucose that would make the house go in gingerbread from Hansel and Gretel for a dietary fantasy. This café-boutique is the HQ of K-pop fans, Korean pop. Moreover, at the back of the room, near cardboard silhouettes of stars, groupies in their twenties are inflating balloons while munching on sesame cakes, currently fashionable in Seoul. Their heart group, CIX, goes to the Bataclan the next day. And it is here that music lovers from Orléans, Lille or Metz have chosen to meet to celebrate the event.
Singers and fans aren’t the only ones stopping off at Kick Café. A little over a year ago, the establishment received the Korean Minister of Culture, Hwang Hee, who came to meet French K-pop fans. “I am very supported by the institutions of the country”, confides with a broad smile the founder of the place, Savannah Truong, 28, indeed helped by the Korean Cultural Center, the embassy, the Kocca (trade and investment promotion agency) and the Kotra (content agency creative). “In November 2022, Kotra even paid me a trip to Seoul to discover the local coffee shops and the products that I could import. » After publishing a book on his house cocktails, K-pop drinks (Hachette, 2022), the young boss feels she has enough support to create another café in London this year. “I want to open ten across the world! »she said without blinking.
In France, coffee shops celebrating Korean culture have already multiplied: the Joha Café, in Lille, the Café 750, in Bordeaux, or the Kiwa Café, in Lyon. You can find colorful pastries and oddities like bungeoppang, a fish-shaped cake filled with sweet red bean paste. The number of Korean restaurants has also exploded. According to the Franco-Korean media company Francezone, they have gone in the space of twenty years from forty to two hundred, in Paris alone. To which must be added more than eighty establishments in the rest of France.
It’s not a tidal wave, but it’s already a very big wave that is not due to chance. K-food, Korean food, is one of the country’s soft power ingredients. The flagship of this policy of influence, the K-food Festival, is a gastronomic festival funded by the Korean Ministry of Agriculture, which took place in July 2022 at the Caroussel du Louvre, quite a symbol. You could learn how to roll kimbaps (a kind of rice rolls stuffed with vegetables) and line up with hundreds of fans – most under 25 – to nibble on skewers brushed with sweet and savory sauce or a bingsu (dessert made from crushed ice and red beans).
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