On a Saturday morning in Northpark, the queue for tofu soup forms before the doors open. The Koreans in Irvine, California are not the storefront pioneers of an older Koreatown. They are surgeons and software engineers, parents comparing notes on which Irvine Unified elementary their child tested into, and grandparents carrying H Mart bags through a parking lot designed, like everything here, decades in advance. This is a Korean community that arrived not to a tenement block but to a master plan.
The Place
Irvine sits in the centre of Orange County, roughly forty miles south of downtown Los Angeles, a city of villages stitched together on what was once a 100,000-acre ranch. It is one of the most deliberately built places in America, and one of the most expensive. The median household income reached $136,719 in 2024, and Asian residents now make up about 44.6 percent of the population, the largest single group in the city.
It is also, famously, safe, green, and academically obsessive. For a generation of Korean families weighing where to raise children in Southern California, those three qualities have functioned almost as a recruiting pitch.
How It Became Korean
To understand why Koreans came to Irvine, you have to start with a place Irvine is not: Garden Grove, fifteen miles to the northwest.
The Ranch and the Plan
The land itself was assembled in 1864, when James Irvine joined Benjamin and Thomas Flint and Llewellyn Bixby to buy more than 100,000 acres of former Mexican ranchos. For nearly a century the Irvine Ranch grew lima beans, citrus, and cattle. There were no Koreans here, and almost no one else either.
That changed in the 1960s. The Irvine Company, rather than selling the land off piecemeal, hired the architect William Pereira to design a city from scratch, organised around a new University of California campus. UC Irvine opened in 1965, the city incorporated in 1971, and Pereira’s “city of intellect” began filling in village by village. It was a blank, planned, university-anchored suburb, and that blankness mattered for what came next.
Little Seoul, and the 1992 Turning Point
Orange County’s first Korean centre was not Irvine but Garden Grove, where, through the 1970s and 1980s, affordable land and housing drew Korean families into the neighbourhood that came to be called Little Seoul. From 1982 to 1992 the county’s Korean American population tripled, much of it concentrated there.
Then came the spring of 1992. After the Los Angeles riots devastated swathes of the original Korean community of Koreatown in Los Angeles, many Korean Americans began moving south, out of the city and into the Orange County suburbs. The migration was partly about safety and partly about schools, and it accelerated a shift that was already underway.
Diffusion to Irvine
Through the 1990s, Korean residents diffused outward from Garden Grove into neighbouring and farther-flung cities: Cerritos, La Palma, Fullerton, Buena Park, and Irvine. Each city drew a slightly different cohort. Irvine, with its top-ranked schools and its new, expensive housing, drew the professionals and the families who could afford to chase an academic edge.
More recently the pattern has sharpened. Younger Koreans, and a wave of newer arrivals from South Korea itself, have gravitated to Buena Park, Fullerton, and Irvine, where the newest and most fashionable Korean businesses now open. By the 2020s Irvine and Fullerton each counted more than 16,000 Korean residents, the highest in Orange County, with Koreans making up roughly four percent of Irvine’s population. Orange County as a whole is now home to about 116,566 Koreans.
The community that resulted looks different from the one in Garden Grove. It is wealthier, younger in parts, more dispersed across master-planned villages rather than concentrated on a single boulevard. The institutions followed the people, and they followed them into strip malls and plazas rather than onto a main street.
This was, in part, a matter of timing. By the time large numbers of Korean families could afford Irvine, the city was already mostly built. There was no empty commercial corridor to claim and rename, the way earlier immigrants had claimed a Mott Street or an Olympic Boulevard. Instead, Korean businesses leased space inside the plazas the Irvine Company had already laid out, and Korean families bought into villages already named and zoned. The community shaped Irvine the way water shapes a poured mould: filling it, not building it.
The Landmarks
Diamond Jamboree Shopping Center, 2700-2750 Alton Parkway. Sitting where Jamboree Road meets Alton Parkway, this plaza is the closest thing Irvine has to a pan-Asian downtown, with more than twenty restaurants spanning Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese kitchens. On weekend nights the lots overflow with families and UC Irvine students, and the Korean tofu houses and dessert counters anchor much of the crowd. It is shared ground, the same plaza that draws the Taiwanese community of Irvine.
Baekjeong, 14160 Culver Drive. The Irvine outpost of the celebrated Korean barbecue chain founded by the wrestler-turned-entertainer Kang Ho-dong, this is where birthdays and graduations get marked over grills of marinated short rib. The wait on a Friday night can stretch past an hour, a small ritual of the Irvine Korean weekend.
H Mart Northpark, Irvine Boulevard and Culver Drive. Opened in early 2023, this 53,341-square-foot grocer was H Mart’s second store in Irvine, and its food court reads like a directory of the community’s tastes: Chang Hwa Dang dumplings, Tous Les Jours bakery, Paik’s Noodle, K Pop Street Food, the Moobongri soondae-soup house, and a Cho Dang tofu house and barbecue. For many families it is less a supermarket than a weekly gathering place.
H Mart Westpark, 3825 Alton Parkway. The original Irvine H Mart, whose H Market Eatery food hall holds nine restaurant stalls. It established the template the Northpark store later expanded: groceries, banchan, fresh fish, and a food court that turns a grocery run into a meal.
Korean American Center and King Sejong Institute, 20 Truman Street, Suite 100. Founded in Irvine in 2015, this non-profit became the first Korean-language centre in the United States to receive WASC accreditation, and it hosts a King Sejong Institute backed by South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. It teaches Korean to children and adults, in person and online, and anchors the cultural life of the community beyond the dinner table.
Culver Plaza, Culver Drive. The strip of Korean cafes, bakeries, and small restaurants clustered along Culver Drive has become a quieter counterpart to the grocery food courts, the kind of place where students nurse a coffee over textbooks and parents pick up a Korean bakery box on the way home. It is everyday infrastructure rather than spectacle, and it is everywhere in this part of the city.
University of California, Irvine. The campus Pereira’s plan was built around remains the gravitational centre for the community’s younger generation. UC Irvine awarded more than 11,000 degrees in 2024, and its large Korean and Korean American student presence keeps a steady current of young people flowing through the city’s cafes and restaurants.
Where They Came From
Irvine’s Koreans are, overwhelmingly, a second migration. Most did not arrive in America at Irvine. They, or their parents, came first to Los Angeles or to Garden Grove, and Irvine was the move up and out: the better school district, the safer street, the larger house.
The original wave from South Korea followed the loosening of US immigration law after 1965, with a heavy professional and entrepreneurial cast, much of it drawn from Seoul and the Gyeonggi region surrounding it. Those families built Little Seoul. Their children, and a newer stream of arrivals coming directly from a wealthier, more globalised South Korea, are the ones now filling Irvine’s villages.
The thread connecting Irvine to other Korean American centres is real and worth tracing. The same professional, education-first ambition that built this community shaped the Korean community of Fort Lee, New Jersey across the country, and the Koreans of Annandale, Virginia outside Washington. Irvine is the Southern California chapter of the same story.
Irvine Today
The Korean presence in Irvine is most visible, perhaps, in its schools. The student body in the Irvine Unified School District is 52.4 percent Asian, the district carries one of the highest academic performance scores in the state, and a Korean Parent Association works as a liaison between Korean families and the schools, running tutoring and mentoring programmes for younger students. For many Korean parents, the school district was the entire reason they chose Irvine, and the community’s energy reflects that.
What Irvine does not have is a single Korean district you can walk. The community is woven through the master plan instead, surfacing in a grocery food court here, a barbecue restaurant there, a language centre in an office park, a study group at UC Irvine. Some older Koreans still drive north to Garden Grove or to Buena Park for the deeper, older commercial Koreatown, and the relationship between affluent Irvine and the working roots of Little Seoul remains a quiet undercurrent of the wider Orange County Korean community.
It is also a city that Koreans share. Irvine is one of the most Asian cities in the country, home to substantial Chinese, Taiwanese, Indian, and Iranian communities alongside the Korean one. The same Diamond Jamboree parking lot that fills with Korean families on a Saturday belongs equally to its Taiwanese and Chinese neighbours, and the city’s Persian and Indian communities anchor plazas of their own a few miles away. The plazas overlap, the schools mix, and the result is something Pereira never quite anticipated: a planned American suburb that became, village by village, one of the most Korean places in California.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Koreans live in Irvine, California?
Irvine is home to more than 16,000 Korean residents, the highest Korean population of any city in Orange County alongside Fullerton. Koreans make up roughly four percent of Irvine’s population, well above the national average.
Why did Koreans move to Irvine rather than Los Angeles?
Many of the Koreans in Irvine arrived as a second migration, moving out of Los Angeles and Garden Grove in search of safer streets and stronger schools. The 1992 Los Angeles riots accelerated this move south into the Orange County suburbs.
Is there a Koreatown in Irvine?
Not in the traditional sense. Unlike Garden Grove’s Little Seoul or Los Angeles Koreatown, Irvine has no single Korean main street. The community is dispersed across the city’s planned villages, plazas, and schools.
Where is the best Korean food in Irvine?
Diamond Jamboree at 2700 Alton Parkway and the two H Mart food courts are the main hubs, with Baekjeong on Culver Drive a favourite for Korean barbecue. Korean cafes and bakeries also cluster along Culver Drive.
How does Irvine relate to the wider Orange County Korean community?
Irvine is one node in a county-wide network that began in Garden Grove and spread through Buena Park, Fullerton, and Cerritos. Many Irvine Korean families still travel north to Garden Grove or Buena Park for the older, denser commercial Koreatown.
What makes Irvine attractive to Korean families specifically?
The Irvine Unified School District, where the student body is 52.4 percent Asian and academic scores rank among California’s highest, is the single biggest draw. Safety, planned green space, and proximity to UC Irvine reinforce the appeal for Korean families.
If your family’s story passed through Irvine, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Seoul to Little Seoul in Garden Grove, to a master-planned village in Irvine, to wherever you are now.