Mr. Kim's

The Restaurant

Mr. Kim's opened in 2022 as the senior dining-room project of the McNellie's Group - the Tulsa hospitality company that operates a dozen downtown bar, gastropub and restaurant concepts across the Arts District and the Blue Dome District. The room occupies a restored two-storey early-twentieth-century commercial building at 119 South Detroit Avenue, half a block south of the Cain's Ballroom and one block east of the Brady Theater - the geographic centre of Tulsa's downtown nightlife corridor. Executive chef Ben Alexander - the McNellie's Group's senior culinary lead and a James Beard Foundation-noted chef whose previous work at Yokozuna and other Tulsa rooms had already established him as the city's most credible Asian-cooking practitioner - designed Mr. Kim's as a deliberate hybrid of upscale Korean steakhouse and contemporary American chef-driven tasting room.

The dining-room programme runs on two parallel tracks: a la carte service in the main hundred-seat dining room and table-grill service at the room's signature recessed booths, where guests can grill their own selections of prime cuts and marinated meats over recessed-grill induction units in the Korean BBQ tradition. The signature multi-course tasting experience - branded as The Baller - runs roughly two hundred and fifty dollars per person and traces a careful Korean-American arc from an oyster opening course through a banchan small-plates progression, a wagyu-and-bulgogi tableside grill section, a fermented-soybean stew palate course, a senior dry-aged ribeye finishing dish and a Korean-shaved-ice dessert (bingsu) with seasonal fruit. The kitchen's careful sourcing of Korean-imported gochugaru chili, Korean soy and traditional fermented bean pastes from Seoul-based suppliers means the dishes register correctly to a Korean diner.

The room's structural co-star is the cocktail programme - McNellie's Group beverage director's careful Korean-and-Japanese influenced cocktail list runs about thirty references with deliberate weight on rare Japanese whisky (Yamazaki 18, Hibiki 21, Nikka Yoichi single cask), Korean soju and craft-makgeolli rice wines, and a careful selection of Korean and Japanese craft-brewery beers. The room runs late by Tulsa standards (kitchen until eleven on Friday and Saturday, bar until one), which has made Mr. Kim's the city's structurally obvious late-night senior dining option - the kind of post-Cain's Ballroom or post-Brady Theater destination that allows a music-event evening to extend into a careful late-night dinner.