Dongyeol Shin

Dongyeol Shin’s path to Kiez runs through a Hamburg red-light district, a finance degree in Vienna, and a one-way ticket back to Seoul with little more than a thousand euros to his name. His family emigrated to Europe in 1994, and he grew up in Hamburg, where bartending was a teenage job before it became a craft. He later trained at Le Lion, one of Germany’s most respected cocktail bars, but then took what looked like the sensible route: a finance degree, a job with a pharmaceutical company, a life as an accountant. It was not the life he wanted, and so he quit, flew to Seoul, and spent his first two weeks sleeping in a public sauna with his suitcase.

In January 2025, he opened Kiez in a basement in Cheongdam, the neighbourhood where Seoul’s most celebrated bars cluster along Dosan-daero. The name means “neighbourhood” in German, and it is a deliberate counter-programming to the see-and-be-seen circuit around it. There is no back bar; no wall of bottles performing luxury. Instead, working with design studio Wild Duck Press, Shin patterned the walls in wood and installed a stained-glass ceiling, mixing mid-century Japanese aesthetics with the clean lines of the Bauhaus. The cocktails follow the same clarity. The menu holds fewer than ten drinks, each built on no more than five essential elements, and every ingredient has to justify its presence in the taste rather than in the technique.

Shin’s all-or-nothing conviction is matched by an amiability that makes the room feel like it belongs to the people in it. The result is a bar that is both rigorously considered and genuinely welcoming, a balance harder to strike than any cocktail list.