A single wave motif, loosely drawn from the Korean flag, runs uninterrupted from The Kimchi‘s facade through its serving counter to the graphics on its walls — the restaurant’s branding and its architecture are, quite literally, the same continuous line. Designed by SOA architekti for a Korean husband-and-wife team, the 135-square-metre (1,453 sq ft) restaurant occupies a former pastry shop next to Prague’s Masaryk Railway Station, partially preserving the original layout it inherited. The result treats Korean street food as a spatial problem to solve, not a cuisine to illustrate.
The clients built this as a personal venture as much as a business: an authentic version of Korean street food, fast and accessible, but prepared daily with ingredients they were unwilling to compromise on. Servings are intentionally limited, which gives The Kimchi the character of a personal culinary experience rather than a scalable fast-food format — at least on the plate.
The site itself sits inside a former pastry shop next to Masaryk Railway Station, one of Prague’s busiest transit points, with the original spatial layout partially retained rather than gutted for a clean slate.
Operationally, the restaurant splits into two connected zones. Primary preparation happens in the back-of-house kitchen, while the final assembly of each dish takes place at the serving counter, in full view of guests — a workflow built to protect freshness while keeping the kitchen visibly connected to the people eating from it.
SOA architekti developed the graphic identity in close collaboration with graphic designer Tomáš Eisner and the clients themselves, drawing on Korean culinary tradition, contemporary pop culture, and the visual energy of Seoul. The result is a dynamic wave that runs from the exterior signage through the counter to the wall graphics — a strategy with a clear cousin in Ninetynine’s Fab Fries Freddy in Amsterdam, where a shrinking tile grid does the same double duty as both architecture and signage inside an even smaller footprint.
Color carries most of that identity. Blue unifies the tables, bench seating, wall finishes, and lighting; red grout cuts through a grid of white tile; and a textured orange mesh hangs above the counter for depth and energy. Mur Mur took a related bet at Sainto in Paris, building an entire fast-food interior around two shades of a single color instead of applied graphics — a different palette, but the same underlying premise that color alone can carry a restaurant’s identity.
Seating stays deliberately varied. Guests can choose dynamic window seating, a communal concrete table, or skip seating altogether and take their meal to go — the format built to move at the speed of urban dining without giving up freshness or a sense of place.
Beyond the graphic system, small craft decisions do real work: bespoke carpentry from Alan Sekula, hand-painted signage from Daniel Plavecký, and a lighting scheme from U1 Lighting built specifically around the wave motif rather than adapted to it afterward.
The tension worth naming is between what the clients describe and what the architecture actually builds. A “personal culinary experience” with limited daily servings sits inside a fully systemized color and graphic identity, engineered to read consistently across facade, counter, and wall — which is less the language of a one-off family venture and more the design vocabulary of a format built to be repeated.
The Kimchi by SOA architekti | Location: Havlíčkova 1682/15, Prague, Czech Republic — Year: 2026 — Key materials: white tile with red grout, blue-painted joinery, textured orange mesh, concrete