Our Story

Three brothers, a best friend,
twenty years, one obsession.

We’re Dennis, David, and Daniel Lee — and Jeff Kim. We’ve been cooking together, building together, and feeding people together for over twenty years.

It started in Boston, where we grew up. Our mother ran a Thai-Korean-Japanese restaurant, and we grew up in that kitchen — learning to cook before we fully understood what we were making, absorbing the rhythms of a family restaurant before we had the language to describe them. Jeff was there too — our best friend since childhood, always close to the table, always part of the family.

Dennis opened his first restaurant at twenty-six. David and Daniel followed. That pattern — one brother leads, the others build alongside him — has defined everything we’ve done since.

Chapter 01 · 2006–2021

Namu and Namu Gaji.

In 2006, we opened Namu on Balboa Street in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. Korean-Japanese-California cuisine, cooked over binchō-tan charcoal, served at the Ferry Building Farmers Market on Thursdays and Saturdays. We brought our aunt from Korea to oversee a house fermentation program using bacteria strains from our family’s village. We pioneered the Korean taco — using nori as the shell instead of a tortilla, filled with Korean ingredients, kimchee, and daikon salsa. The Korean tacos, okonomiyaki, gamja fries, and KFC — our Korean Fried Chicken — built a following that carried us to the next chapter.

In 2008, Jeff moved to San Francisco to pursue his own culinary path. He’d grown up alongside us, watched the same things we watched, absorbed the same instincts about food and hospitality — and when he landed in the city, he landed with us. What started as a reunion became a working partnership. Jeff brought his own energy and discipline into our kitchens, and over the years he became not just a collaborator but a partner in the business.

In 2012, we moved to 499 Dolores Street in the Mission District and renamed it Namu Gaji. For the next nine years, that restaurant became our life.

The SF Chronicle called Namu Gaji “the city’s most representative restaurant.”

Dennis won the Rising Star Chef Award from San Francisco Magazine in his first year there. We were named to Eater SF’s 38 Essential Restaurants. The Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times, and the SF Chronicle all covered what we were building.

But the thing we were most proud of wasn’t the press. It was the community we built — bringing people together through food, representing our heritage, uplifting Asian Americans, and upholding the standards we believed in. The restaurant was a gathering place. The food was how we connected.

Chapter 02 · The Farm

Namu Farm in Sunol.

We operated a two-acre farm in Sunol, California — Namu Farm — run by farmer Kristyn Leach using Korean Natural Farming techniques. No petroleum fuel. No synthetic inputs. Indigenous microorganisms. Everything hand-farmed.

During peak summer, eighty percent of our menu came directly from that farm. The chile pepper seeds came from our mother’s hometown in Korea. Kristyn co-founded Second Generation Seeds to preserve the East Asian heirloom varieties we were growing. Together, we developed the Lady Choi gochu pepper — a Korean chili variety selected across multiple progeny lines from our aunt’s farm, versatile enough for dipping green in doenjang or drying into bright, fruity gochugaru.

We weren’t doing farm-to-table because it was a trend. We were doing it because controlling the ingredients was the only way to make the food we wanted to make.

Chapter 03 · Dennis

What Dennis built along the way.

Dennis doesn’t stay still. While running Namu Gaji, he also served as head chef at Smokestack at Magnolia Brewing in Dogpatch — the only BBQ restaurant in San Francisco with no gas line, all wood-fired. He took over the kitchen at Magnolia Pub on Haight Street. He launched Namu Stonepot on Divisadero as a fast-casual extension. He collaborated with Williams Sonoma on a Korean-inspired food collection that brought Namu’s KFC mix and Korean fried chicken sauce to home cooks nationally.

He cooked on live fire. He cured beef tongue for seven days into Korean pastrami. He made the Minoko sandwich — a mini-okonomiyaki with oysters, kimchee, and cheese that people still ask about. He built menus organized around texture and technique: raw, broth, salad, crispy, grill, comfort.

Dennis’s philosophy has always been personal. He resists national labels for his cooking. His food is “Dennis Lee” — not just Korean, not just Japanese. American. Ingredient-driven, seasonal, built on family tradition and constant refinement.

Chapter 04 · 2021

The closing.

Namu Gaji closed in 2021. COVID. Nine years of everything we had, and we all know that story.

We didn’t quit. We distilled.

Everything we learned — about sourcing, about consistency, about feeding people with intention — we carried into a new format. Smaller. More focused. Built around one product we believed in more than anything else in a bakery case.

Chapter 05 · Today

Pixlcat Coffee & Butter Mochi.

Pixlcat Coffee & Butter Mochi is what happened next — the first butter mochi café.

We built a café around two things: butter mochi and specialty coffee. Not a coffee shop that happens to sell pastries. Not a bakery that happens to pour espresso. A place where the food and the coffee are designed to work together — where the chewy, coconut-rich sweetness of butter mochi meets the roast-driven bitterness of a great espresso, and both are better for it.

Dennis created the entire butter mochi program. Seven flavors, developed with the same rigor he applied to a restaurant tasting menu — Classic, Chocolate, Matcha, Ube White Chocolate, Black Sesame, S’more, and Breakfast. Every recipe is his. Every technique is refined from thousands of batches. Jeff heads the butter mochi production in San Francisco — the same hands-on precision he’s brought to everything since he first walked into our kitchen, now applied to making sure every single piece meets the standard.

David runs operations and builds community. Daniel works behind the scenes on strategy. The same dynamic we’ve always had — plus the best friend who became family, who became a partner, who never left.

We serve Four Barrel Coffee’s Friendo Blendo espresso in San Francisco and George Howell coffee in Boston. We bake all seven flavors fresh every morning. We still show up at the Ferry Building Farmers Market on Saturdays — the same market where we started serving nori tacos in 2009.

The craft doesn’t end. It refocuses. Same standards. New format.

Come taste what twenty years of cooking looks like when it’s concentrated into a single perfect bite.

— Dennis, David, Daniel, and Jeff