The owners of Seoul Food Meat Co. are opening a fast casual concept in SouthPark that will highlight some of the original South End restaurant’s most popular menu items. Bit by Seoul Food’s menu will focus on chicken wings and tacos, serving diners in the former Tandur Indian Kitchen space near Yafo Kitchen this winter.

“We’ve tried to make it a little one-off of Seoul Food, with a little bit of Seoul Food’s menu,” owner Timothy Chun says. “We took our most popular items like the wings and the tacos and things like that and decided to accentuate them.”

To help with that, the restaurant’s kitchen replaces Tandur’s bread ovens with kebab spits. The menu will center around three meats: soy pork, bulgogi beef, and spicy chicken. The proteins can be enjoyed inside tacos, bao buns, or lettuce wraps, as well as part of rice bowls or salads. The restaurant’s signature, crispy wings will also be a focus on the menu, with more flavor options.

Once guests receive their orders, there will be a bar of sauces and seasonings to amp up the flavors.

While Chun says a second Seoul Food Meat Co. is in the works, the pandemic has made it difficult to open a full-service restaurant, mostly due to labor shortages. Operating a fast-casual concept minimizes the number of employees needed to run a restaurant.

“For a full-service restaurant to have a full line of servers, you need about 15 servers just to have five servers on the floor, any given night,” Chun says.

To turn Tandur’s vacated space into Bit by Seoul Food, Chun says they’ve had to do little work other than cosmetic changes and switching out the bread ovens.

“We’re just happy that business is back,” Chun says. “People want to come to our current restaurants, people want to come out, but it is very difficult servicing those people. So that’s one thing that we’re asking the public to be very mindful of: have some patience with the restaurant and our staff and any restaurant in general.”