After Nixa’s only Korean restaurant closed back in November, I’ve been on the lookout for another Korean restaurant locally. Thankfully, 14 Mill Market announced that The Gochu, a Korean Barbecue restaurant, would open in the Mill at the beginning of the year. I was super excited because now I didn’t have to drive to Springfield to get Korean food anymore.
I visited The Gochu in March and I was not disappointed. I went with my friend and her sister and we decided to share a couple of different dishes to try. First, we got the crispy dumplings. The dumplings were large and very flavorful. They even came with a small plastic dropper where you could put the soy sauce in the dumplings and prevent a potential soy sauce mess. We also tried the Gochu Chile Chicken. It came with stir-fried chicken with rice cakes, vegetables, serrano and árbol peppers all on top of a pile of rice. I’m a fan of spicy foods and think my spice tolerance is higher than average, so I was worried that the Chile Chicken would be too mild, but it turned out to be just the right amount of spice. There was a lot of chicken for the cost.
Finally, we finished off our meal with iced Thai tea. When we ordered it they had to make a fresh batch — it was so good. The change from salty and spicy food to a sweet, cold drink was refreshing. Aside from the food at The Gochu, I’m not a fan of the interior of 14 Mill Market but The Gochu has a cute, modern look. If The Gochu ever opens their own building in Nixa, I hope they stick with a similar decor style because it’s aesthetic and relaxing.

At the beginning of January, 14 Mill Market opened its arms to a couple of new restaurants — one such restaurant being The Gochu, a handcrafted Korean barbecue bowl restaurant.
The owner of The Gochu, Leo Kim, started the restaurant in hopes of exposing people to different types of foods they haven’t tried before.
“I opened the same restaurant back in 2018,” Kim said. “I was doing a travel chief type of restaurant. My main idea was to make people open to trying Korean food because many people don’t know about Korean food. What I did was fusion: Korean food with the best of each item.”
Kim has found it beneficial to relocate his restaurant to 14 Mill Market.
“It’s a self-service [restaurant] so that helps in the sense that we don’t need to do the extra work like serving tables,” Kim said. “We get tips from the customer’s orders and we can share the tips with all the employees … that’s a good benefit and creates better teamwork [with] the team.”
The Gochu offers a variety of food that is hard to find in Nixa.
“There’s not many options here to go eat [Korean food],’ Kim said. “I thought it was a good idea to offer, especially for local people – something different; you can find pretty much everything you look for in The Gochu. … Our menu is very diverse and it’s very different.”