Business Reporting (Profile of a small business)

By Kosuke Takahashi

May 5, 2003

“Obey the customs of the village you enter,” a saying goes. Adhering to this proverb faithfully, a maverick Korean woman has been running a prosperous food business in the midst of the black community for decades.

Betty Park, 50, a Korean native who came to Harlem in 1983, has expanded her food business after years and years of trial and error. She now runs Manna’s Restaurant, a chain of the Harlem-based soul-food restaurants: three in Central Harlem; two in Brooklyn. She employs about 100 people and generates almost $5 million in annual sales. Her foray into the soul food business is the fruit of her untiring efforts.

“My family in Seoul was so poor that I had just dreamed of spending a better life in the U.S. and of sending money constantly to my remaining family in Seoul,” Park said.

In 1974, Park, a college student in Seoul, left South Korea and immigrated to the United States with her husband. She first arrived in Detroit. Then, after a year of job-hunting, she finally landed a job as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant despite her poor English-language skills.

She spent five years at the restaurant, gaining valuable experience that would serve her later on when she became a restaurateur. For example, she said, she learned a lot about how to deal with customers and employees, as well as how to handle food.

“If you do not respect customers and employees very well, they both will leave your place and never come back again,” Park said. “That’s a big headache for business owners.”

In 1980, Park opened her own Chinese restaurant in Detroit with her savings. The restaurant was a very small take-out restaurant, she said. She hired only a Chinese cook.

 “‘A Chinese can do it, then a Korean can also do it,’ that’s what I thought,” Park said. “Moreover, I do not want to work for somebody. I do not like somebody always telling me what to do. That’s my personality and that’s what I am.”

In 1983, Park moved to Harlem with her husband and two sons, where her uncle had run a grocery store. In Harlem, she bought a fish market with the capital she had earned and with loans from relatives. “My husband is not interested in business,” she explained. “In Korea, in general, man always comes first and woman is behind. But we are so different and the opposite type. He always leaves me alone.” Until they came to Harlem, her husband had worked for an American factory in Detroit.

One year later, in 1984, Park returned to the restaurant business, opening a tiny 300 square-foot barbeque restaurant, on 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard where Manna’s Restaurant’s main restaurant is located now. She chose a barbeque restaurant, not a Chinese or a Korean one, because she was firmly convinced that many of the black people liked it. The rest of her family members continued to run the fish market for a couple more years.

Everything seemed to be going well for Park, until the mid-1980s, when the African American community in Harlem launched boycott campaigns against the Korean businesses in Harlem, as it happened in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. In response, Park hired two African Americans to work as assistants and she set up scholarship programs for Harlem students, giving them a total of $4,000 to $5000 every year.

“I learned I cannot make money from the community without giving them something,” Park said. “Working with them and contributing to them, that’s what I’ve learned.”

But in 1989, she again closed her restaurant and opened a boutique shop on 125 Street. “I was very tired of running my restaurant because I always had to do hard work,” she said.

But Park’s boutique only lasted a year. “I did not know anything about boutiques and jewelries. I learned another lesson: you’ve got to do what you know.” She did not divulge how much she lost.

Then, in 1990, she again felt the urge to open a restaurant, this time reopening her soul food restaurant in the same spot where she had started in 1984. She hired four black people. The rest of her family members kept running the fish market.

Her challenge continued. As chain stores like Starbucks and Wilson's Leather moved in, rents rose rapidly, making it harder to stay in business. Over the past two decades Park has seen rents rise ten times. Many small businesses were forced to move out, so did many Korean businesses.

“We used to have 45 Korean stores in this area,” said Park, who is also a vice president of The Korean Commercial Association of Harlem. “Now we only have 15 to 20.”

In 1994, as her business struggled, Park could make no profits and tried to sell Mann’s, but nobody was interested.

She was finally realizing she could not give it up and needed to do something to make the business better. Then in 1997, she closed the restaurant for two months and gave it a complete makeover—new lighting and signage, an expanded menu and salad bar—using an $80,000 loan from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation, which provides grants and loans for renovating stores and helping merchants around Harlem, Inwood, and Washington Heights.

To reflect the evolving taste and broader mix of her customers, she put over 130 dishes on the menu. For example, Chicken dishes alone constitute over 10 items: fried, baked, barbecued, sesame, curried, sweet and sour, stir fried, jerk, grilled, and salad. Moreover, she introduced a buffet-style order to her eating house, by which customers can eat whatever they want. But unlike other buffet-style restaurants that adopted a fixed price system, Manna’s started selling foods by the pound: $3.99 for hot food and salad bar; $4.99 for most meat. But most customers still pay $6 to $7 for their lunch.

This renovation became a major breakthrough for her business. And in 1999, she opened the second Manna’s on 134 Street and Lenox Avenue near HarlemHospital. “That was a golden spot,” she said. “Just two or three weeks later, people could not get in the restaurant because it was always crowded.”

Just one month ago, she opened the fifth Manna’s in Brooklyn.

About 40 diners were devouring spareribs and crisp fried chicken at Manna’s Restaurant on 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard on a recent afternoon shopping rush.

“My son and I like this place pretty much,” said Connie Gabbedon, 28, of Central Harlem, who accompanied her 4-year-old son Yacou to the restaurant two days in a row. “The food is very fresh, no leftover food here, because it’s always coming out at its peak time. My son loves a fried chicken and macaroni cheese with soda.” Yacou nodded. Gabbedon had been aware that the restaurant owner is a Korean woman.

“She has been contributing a lot to the community,” Barbara Askins, president of the 125th Street Business Improvement District, said of Park and her business. “She gives away food and money to the community and started scholarships here.” Park is a board member of the District.

Richard Harley, district manager of Community Board 10 that encompasses Central Harlem, agreed. “She is a terrific businesswoman. She has been involving so many civic activities here.”

Other soul food restaurant owners and managers on 125^th Street declined to make comments on Manna’s success. But Max Johnson, a waitress at M & G Diner which is located just one block away from the Manna’s main restaurant, said: “they have different kind of foods we don’t have. Like fruits, which we don’t have.”

Roberta Chmielnik, a food industry consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ New York office, said of the success of Manna’s, “It’s very effective for small businesses to show ‘we are part of your community.’ And every Manna’s restaurant provides the same taste and recipes of foods. That’s very important because as people travel, they try to go to another chain-restaurant, knowing its taste is the same.”

Chmielnik also emphasized the good locations of every Manna’s restaurant.

Sonia Jang, president and founder of the Organization for African American and Korean American Solidarity, a non-profit group in Manhattan, said, “There is a couple of Korean women in New York who has been successful in business. But Ms. Park is outstanding. She has good relations with workers and the community.” Park has been a board member of the organization for the past few years.

The city’s Korean-American community has been burgeoning in the past. The census shows the city’s Korean-American population has grown from 69,718 in 1990 to 86,473 in 2000.

Koreatowns sprang into being, from a bookstore and a handful of restaurants, in both Flushing, Queens and the midtown Manhattan bordered by 31^st and 36^th Street and Fifth and Sixth Avenues. And their success, more and more Korean businesses settled in the neighborhoods as immigration from Korea grew. By the mid-1980s, the area started to resemble a street in Seoul.

Park is not thinking about expanding her business beyond New York City, but she is hoping to run a wedding ceremony center in Harlem or Downtown Manhattan in the near future.

“For me, the word business means challenge and progress,” Park said. “I cannot bring money to my grave. I want to create much more jobs, hiring a lot of people. I believe that’s good for the society.”