This Italian restaurant started in Seoul, expanded to Durham and is now in North Hills
The childhood comfort of an Italian pasta noodle is the thread that connects a family of restaurants in Seoul and Durham.
Now that family has expanded to Raleigh with a sprawling new restaurant.
Cucciolo Terrazza just opened in North Hills, becoming the first new restaurant to open in the Advance Auto Parts Tower. This Cucciolo is a sister restaurant to Cucciolo Osteria, which opened in downtown Durham in 2018.
Jimmy Kim is the chef and owner of the North Carolina Cucciolos. In a 2018 review written as a love letter, former News & Observer dining critic Greg Cox swooned over the restaurant, awarding it four stars and naming it one of the Triangle’s best new restaurants.
“I close my eyes, and your many other delights begin to parade across my imagination,” Cox wrote in that review, gushing over everything from carbonara to risotto to tiramisu.
The new Cucciolo Terrazza will veer more in the direction of the sea, Kim said, with the menu including more seafood and fish dishes than its Durham counterpart.
Cucciolo focuses on some of Italy’s most classic dishes, but serves versions reminiscent of the Kim’s childhood meals visiting Italy. He said that’s by design, that the classics never go out of style.
“Food evolves with time, but we’ve tried to do more authentic Italian dishes,” Kim said. “People rarely get tired of the most traditional dishes when they’re done well. That’s the root of our philosophy.”
Starting in South Korea
Started by Julian Kim, Cucciolo Osteria opened in Seoul in 2015 and has since expanded to three different restaurants there. His cousin and Duke alum Jimmy Kim moved the brand to Durham in 2018.
The cousins lived in Europe for a decade growing up, and Jimmy Kim said Italian food became a thing of comfort.
As he was considering an expansion, Kim said he outsourced some of the research to a class of students at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, his alma mater. He had considered Charlotte and downtown Raleigh, but their findings pointed to North Hills.
“It’s a brand new space in a brand new building,” Kim said. “We’ve been thinking about a second restaurant since 2019. I did my own research and frankly I was surprised it matched up. Then I really fell in love with the space.”
The most striking difference between the restaurants is the sheer size of Cucciolo Terrazza, which at 130 seats has more than double than the seating of the Osteria. There are also two private dining rooms, including one built as a wine cellar.
Trials before success
Kim’s first restaurant foray came after he finished business school, opening Chapel Hill’s Mixed Casual Korean Bistro in 2012 and its spinoff food truck. The restaurant specialized in bibimbap bowls, and Kim called it a Chipotle for Korean food. Ultimately it closed, but was a stepping stone to Cucciolo.
“Fast-casual was very popular at the time,” Kim said. “But I didn’t have any experience running a restaurant at that point. I dove head first and made a lot of rookie mistakes. It didn’t quite work out.”
Kim said location choices and the trials of food costs doomed the restaurant from taking over the fast-casual world.
But in 2018 he thought his cousin’s Cucciolo Osteria might find a place in downtown Durham. In the years since, he said he’s had a number of customers come into the Durham location who had also dined at a Cucciolo in Seoul.
“It’s interesting how people’s tastes are different in the Korean versus U.S. locations,” Kim said. “Spicy vodka sauce with rigatoni, that’s a dish that is popular for us that isn’t in Korea.”
On to North Hills
Terrazza means terrace in Italian, but Kim said the namesake patio likely won’t open until next spring as construction on the building continues.
The handsome new dining room centers around a large white marble and wooded bar.
“Like in Durham, the space really spoke to us, with the big brick wall and wooden ceiling,” Kim said. “North Hills is a more modern neighborhood, so we tried to use that to our advantage and build clean lines, wood and marble. Because who doesn’t like marble?”
This story was originally published October 18, 2021 at 10:00 AM with the headline "This Italian restaurant started in Seoul, expanded to Durham and is now in North Hills."
