Pull into the strip mall at 7220 Columbia Pike and the first thing you notice is the smell: garlic and charred pork belly leaking out of Honey Pig before you have even opened the car door. Above the entrance, a cartoon pig in headphones grins beside Korean characters twice the size of the English. Across the turnpike, a purple awning marks a soup house. Two doors down, a bakery sells red-bean buns and a hagwon tutors high schoolers for the SAT. There is no boardwalk here, no plaza to stroll, no subway stop. The Koreans in Annandale built the eating capital of Korean America’s third-largest community out of postwar strip malls, and almost nobody walks it. You drive from one parking lot to the next.
Annandale: The Place
Annandale is a census-designated place in Fairfax County, Virginia, about two miles east of the Capital Beltway and ten from downtown Washington. Its center sits where three roads cross: Little River Turnpike (Route 236), Columbia Pike (Route 244), and Annandale Road. The housing stock is postwar suburban, ranch and split-level homes on wooded lots laid out for federal workers in the 1950s. There is no Metro rail station, which shaped everything that came after.
How Annandale Became Koreatown
Before the Koreans
For most of its history Annandale was farmland. In 1685 an Englishman named William Fitzhugh bought more than 24,000 acres and his descendants worked the tract, called Ravensworth, for six generations. A Scottish settler gave the place its name around 1830, after Annan in Scotland. The Little River Turnpike was completed in 1806 and Columbia Pike followed two years later, the roads that still organize the town.
Then came the suburban boom. Fairfax County’s population jumped from roughly 40,000 in 1950 to more than 170,000 in 1960, and Annandale filled in with subdivisions and a small downtown of shops near the turnpike intersection. By the early 1980s that downtown was tired. Shopping had drifted to the malls, storefronts sat empty, and the strips along Columbia Pike were exactly the kind of cheap commercial real estate that a new wave of immigrants could afford.
The Koreans Arrive
Korean migration to Washington started small and official. After South Korea opened the door to its citizens leaving, and after the 1965 Immigration Act reopened America’s, the trickle of embassy staff, war brides, and graduate students that had defined the 1950s and 1960s became a flow of families. By 1960 only a few hundred Koreans lived in the city. They settled first where the work was, often running businesses in the District while looking for somewhere cheaper and quieter to live.
That somewhere was Northern Virginia. Fairfax County offered well-regarded public schools, a manageable commute into federal Washington, and lower taxes than the Maryland suburbs. The county even opened an economic development office in Seoul to court investment. Families that had landed in Falls Church or the District moved out to Annandale through the late 1970s and 1980s. Steve Lee, who would become one of the neighborhood’s most visible business owners, arrived with his family in 1976, lived briefly in Falls Church, and settled in Annandale by 1978. By the early 1980s roughly a hundred Korean students were enrolled at Annandale High School.
The restaurants followed the families, and chain migration did the rest. A relative who opened a shop sponsored the next, who hired a cousin, who saved and opened his own place down the strip. In 1988 there was a single small Korean restaurant, Kaboja, on Columbia Pike. In 1992 a former Pizza Hut reopened as Jin Sung Garden under a restaurateur named Louis Kay. Four years later there were nine. The pattern compounded the way enclaves do: each new business made the next more likely, because suppliers, signmakers, accountants, and a Korean-reading customer base were already in place.
Annandale at Its Peak
By the 2000s downtown Annandale had become, in the words locals used among themselves, Koreatown. Korean banks, churches, bakeries, karaoke rooms, and cram schools clustered into a three-mile stretch of Little River Turnpike and Columbia Pike. A 2012 survey of the central business district found that 58 percent of commercial properties were Korean-owned, including the bulk of the Evergreen office condominiums where doctors, lawyers, and travel agents hung bilingual shingles.
The Washington region’s Korean population was now among the largest in the country. Nearly a quarter of Fairfax County’s roughly 40,000 ethnic Koreans lived in Annandale and neighboring Centreville. The food scene drew Koreans from across the metro, and increasingly everyone else too. Annandale never had the polish of Koreatown in Los Angeles or the dense main-street walkability of the Korean business district in Palisades Park, New Jersey. What it had was concentration: dozens of kitchens within a few blocks, open late, lit by neon Hangul.
The Change
Two forces reshaped Annandale’s Koreatown. The first was simple success. As families prospered, many moved further out, to Centreville, Chantilly, and Vienna, where newer subdivisions and even larger churches were rising. Centreville alone came to host more Korean restaurants than Annandale. The second was friction with the older town that the Koreans had moved into.
The signs became the flashpoint. By the early 2000s, storefronts along the turnpike carried large Korean characters subtitled in tiny English, and some restaurants printed menus in Korean only. To owners whose clientele was overwhelmingly Korean, a Korean sign was simply good business. To some longtime residents, downtown no longer felt like theirs. County officials spent years nudging businesses to add English, and the tension surfaced again, loudly, in a 2024 to 2025 fight over whether to give a stretch of road an honorary Korean name.
The Landmarks of Annandale
Kaboja and Jin Sung Garden (Columbia Pike). Kaboja was the lone Korean restaurant on the Pike in 1988, the seed of everything. Jin Sung Garden, opened in 1992 by Louis Kay in a converted Pizza Hut, became the early anchor that proved a barbecue house could thrive out here, and the count of Korean restaurants climbed from one to nine within four years of its arrival.
Honey Pig, 7220 Columbia Pike. Founded in 2007 by Micky Kim, who had immigrated in the late 1970s and started over in Baltimore, Honey Pig built its reputation on loud music, a smoky dining room, and pork belly seared on a domed grill. The single Annandale location grew into a chain that now reaches Texas, but the original strip-mall storefront, pig logo and all, is still the picture people use for Annandale.
Yechon, 4121 Hummer Road. For two decades Yechon was the place that never closed, a 24-hour kitchen serving bulgogi, galbi, and a full sushi menu to night-shift workers, clubgoers, and insomniac students. It scaled back its round-the-clock hours after the pandemic, but it remains one of the neighborhood’s institutions.
To Sok Jip, on Columbia Pike. Behind a purple awning across from Honey Pig, To Sok Jip made its name on the unglamorous heart of Korean home cooking: mackerel, kimchi stew, and bo ssam, the tender boiled pork belly wrapped in cabbage. It is the kind of long-running soup-and-stew house that regulars measure the neighborhood by.
Shilla Bakery. A full-service Korean bakery and cafe whose cases of cream buns, fruit cakes, and red-bean pastries made it one of Annandale’s most beloved stops. Its success carried it to additional locations around the DMV, a small chain grown from a single Annandale storefront.
The Korean Community Center, 6601 Little River Turnpike. Home to the Korean American Association of Greater Washington, the center took twelve years of organizing and fundraising to establish. It anchors the community’s civic life and helps stage the annual KORUS Festival, which began in an old Kmart parking lot in Annandale before it grew.
Korean Central Presbyterian Church. Founded in 1973, KCPC grew into one of the largest Korean congregations in the country. In 2010 it moved to an 80-acre campus in Centreville drawing thousands of worshippers each week, the visible peak of a dense network of Korean-language churches that knit Northern Virginia’s families together far beyond the dinner table.
Where the Annandale Koreans Came From
The families who built Annandale’s Koreatown came overwhelmingly from South Korea, and disproportionately from the cities, with Seoul foremost among them. Many were educated, middle-class people who had left a country industrializing at breakneck speed, drawn by American universities, professional opportunity, and, for an earlier cohort, marriage to U.S. servicemen stationed on the peninsula.
They chose Washington over the older Korean magnets of Los Angeles and New York for concrete reasons. The federal government and its contractors offered white-collar work; nonstop flights eventually linked Dulles to Incheon; and the Korean church, transplanted whole, gave each new arrival an instant community. Annandale’s appeal within that was its cheap commercial space and the schools next door, a combination that turned a fading suburban downtown into the region’s Korean main street.
Annandale Today
Annandale is still the eating capital. Close to fifty Korean restaurants operate in and around its center, and the Washington area remains the third-largest concentration of Korean Americans in the United States, with Annandale as its kitchen. Food tours now sell out, bringing outsiders to grill their own galbi and learn the difference between a sullungtang and a budae jjigae. The clientele has broadened well past the founding generation.
The old tension over identity has not vanished, but it has matured into something closer to negotiation. In 2024, business owners led by Steve Lee proposed an honorary name, Gangnam Street or simply Koreatown, for a stretch of Little River Turnpike. The pushback from longtime residents and the group Annandale United was intense, much of it about process and about singling out one community in a place that is now also heavily Latino. After two community meetings and a county survey, the Board of Supervisors compromised in August 2025, granting the honorary name Seoul Boulevard to a shorter run of John Marr Drive instead.
That compromise is Annandale in miniature: a place still arguing, in public, over whose name goes on the sign, while the parking lots fill every weekend with people who came for the food. The first generation built it out of half-empty strip malls. The second is deciding what to keep. If you want to understand how a Korean Washington took root in the suburbs, the way a Vietnamese Falls Church grew up a few miles north, you start here, at a folding-tabbed grill with the exhaust fan roaring.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Koreans settle in Annandale, Virginia?
Koreans in Annandale were drawn by Fairfax County’s strong public schools, an easy commute into federal Washington, and lower taxes than the Maryland suburbs. Just as important, downtown Annandale had cheap, half-empty commercial strips in the 1980s, exactly the affordable space immigrant entrepreneurs needed to open their first restaurants and shops.
Is Annandale still a Korean neighborhood today?
Yes, though it has changed. Many Korean families have moved further out to Centreville, Chantilly, and Vienna, and the area is now also heavily Latino. But Annandale remains the region’s Korean dining capital, with close to fifty Korean restaurants and a dense cluster of bakeries, churches, banks, and businesses.
What are the most famous Korean landmarks in Annandale?
Honey Pig at 7220 Columbia Pike, founded in 2007, is the best-known, its cartoon-pig sign practically the logo of the neighborhood. Other touchstones include the 24-hour institution Yechon on Hummer Road, the soup house To Sok Jip, Shilla Bakery, and the Korean Community Center on Little River Turnpike.
Where did the Annandale Koreans come from?
The community came overwhelmingly from South Korea, and especially from its cities, with Seoul the single largest source. Many were university-educated professionals who chose Washington over Los Angeles or New York for its federal-sector jobs and its established Korean churches.
When did Koreans first arrive in Annandale?
A handful of Koreans lived in the Washington area by 1960, mostly embassy staff, students, and war brides. The first Koreans in Annandale arrived as families in the 1970s, and the first Korean restaurant opened on Columbia Pike in 1988, with the Koreatown of restaurants and businesses taking shape through the 1990s.
If your family’s story passed through a Korean kitchen in Annandale, a pew in one of its churches, or a first apartment off the turnpike, that history is worth holding onto.