# Arirang in Hong Kong: What BTS and Our Restaurant Have in Common

Arirang · Culture · Korean Restaurant · Hong Kong · Est. 1964
https://www.arirang.com.hk/blog/arirang-in-hong-kong-what-bts-and-our-restaurant-have-in-common/

In March 2026, BTS released an album called *Arirang*. This restaurant has carried the same name in Wan Chai since 1964. Neither is decoration. Both are named after the same Korean folk song, and very nearly for the same reason.

K-pop sensation BTS chose to name their comeback album *Arirang*: their tenth, released on 20 March 2026, and their first full-group record in nearly four years.

## If you searched Arirang HK looking for the concert

You are in the right city and the wrong Arirang, so here is what you came for. BTS play three nights at Kai Tak Stadium - 4, 6 and 7 March 2027 - as the Hong Kong stop of the *Arirang* world tour. It is the 50,000-seat main stadium at Kai Tak Sports Park, and announced ticket prices ran from HK$799 to HK$3,299 for the VIP package. [Tickets for all three Hong Kong nights are on Live Nation Hong Kong](https://www.livenation.hk/en/bts-tickets-adp830746).

The other Arirang in Hong Kong is this one: a Korean restaurant on the third floor of Winland Square, 314-324 Hennessy Road, Wan Chai, open since 1964 and across the harbour from the stadium. We had the name first, by sixty-two years.

## What does Arirang mean?

The honest answer is that nobody knows, and that is the first thing we have in common with the album: a name that is felt rather than translated. *Arirang* is not a word in modern Korean. Scholars have suggested that *ari* once meant beautiful and *rang* a beloved one; others trace it to an old word for hometown, to the name of a queen of Silla, to a deity carried east along the trade routes. None of it is settled. What survives is the refrain - 아리랑 아리랑 아라리요 - and a line about crossing the Arirang Pass, a pass no map has ever located.

What is documented is the scale. When UNESCO inscribed Arirang on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2012, it put the count at roughly 3,600 variations across some sixty versions. Three regional ones are best known: Jeongseon in Gangwon, Jindo in South Jeolla, Miryang in South Gyeongsang. North Korea's own Arirang was inscribed separately in 2014, making it one of the very few things both Koreas have taken to UNESCO.

## Why BTS named an album Arirang

Their label said the song "has long been associated with emotions of connection, distance, and reunion", transcending time and generations. For a group reassembling after military service, that reads less like a marketing line than a description of the preceding four years. RM has described the record as an answer to the question of what BTS is in 2026.

The song is not only on the cover. *Body to Body*, the opening track, samples Gyeonggi Arirang - the standard version, the one whose verse we quote in [our own piece on the song](/blog/arirang-the-song-that-follows-koreans-everywhere/) - and lets a choral rendition surface in the bridge. At the comeback broadcast from Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul on 21 March, before an estimated 104,000 people in the square and 18.4 million viewers on Netflix, that passage was handed to singers and musicians in Joseon-era dress, who sang Arirang in the middle of a Diplo-produced pop record.

It was not a quiet gesture. *Arirang* entered the Billboard 200 at number one with 641,000 album-equivalent units - the largest week for any group since Billboard began counting in units in December 2014 - and became the first album by a K-pop act to spend three consecutive weeks at the top.

## Why a Hong Kong restaurant chose the same name in 1964

We named our restaurant, the first Korean restaurant in HK, after the song Arirang. It opened in Wan Chai in 1964, at a point when Korean food had no presence in the city at all.

The song is the thing Koreans take with them. It is sung in Korean communities in China and in Russia; it is sung by people who have not seen Korea in decades. Naming a restaurant eight thousand kilometres from Seoul after it is the same gesture as putting it on the cover of a record made for a global audience - a statement of where the thing came from, and the essence of who we are.

## Which Arirang dish to order, by member

Now the part you actually came here for. To be clear: these are our pairings, not theirs. Nobody in this kitchen has the faintest idea what BTS eat, and we are not claiming otherwise - we have gone on public personality alone, the way you would order for friends you know well enough to guess. All prices exclude the 10% service charge.

- **RM** - *Arirang SsahmBahb* (아리랑쌈밥, five-grain rice with leaves for wrapping, HK$230). The one who thinks about it first. Nothing arrives finished: you build each parcel yourself, decide what goes in, and take your time over it. It also happens to carry the restaurant's name, which is fitting for the member who spent a whole album asking what a name means.
- **Jin** - *Wagyu DeungShim* (와규등심, M9 Wagyu rib eye, HK$750). For the eldest, who will insist on paying and would quite like you to be impressed. This is the plate that manages it. Worldwide Handsome, worldwide expensive.
- **SUGA** - *MaeWoon Dweji* (매운돼지고기, spicy pork collar, HK$170). Deadpan, no garnish, quietly lethal. It never raises its voice and it does not have to - you will still be thinking about it an hour later.
- **j-hope** - *HaeMool PahJuhn* (해물파전, seafood and spring onion pancake, HK$120/180). Pure kinetic energy. It arrives hissing, everyone reaches at once, and the mood of the whole table lifts. He is also from Gwangju in South Jeolla - the province Jindo Arirang comes from, and the one Koreans send you to when you say you want to eat well.
- **Jimin** - *Modeum HaeMool* (모듬해물, seafood barbecue platter: fish, spicy cuttlefish, prawn, scallop, HK$480). For the one who orders on everybody else's behalf and keeps checking that you have eaten. Grill it at the table and pass the best pieces to someone else, which is the entire point of it.
- **V** - *YookHwe* (육회, beef tartare, HK$220). Orders the thing nobody saw coming and turns out to be right. Cold, precise, faintly old-fashioned, and considerably better than it needs to be.
- **Jung Kook** - *BooDae Jjigeh* (부대찌개, army stew, HK$420). The pun writes itself twice: a stew named for an army, ordered by ARMY, for the member who came back from one. It also suits a famously committed eater - everything goes in the pot, and it carries on until the pot is empty. Real dish, real history: improvised around surplus from American bases after the Korean War, and comfort food ever since.

If your group cannot agree, order *Modeum GoGi* (모듬고기, assorted beef, chicken, pork and lamb, HK$390) and stop negotiating. Barbecue at Arirang is grilled at the table on smokeless grills - we brought the first ones to Hong Kong in 1983 - so nobody arrives at Kai Tak smelling of dinner.

## A folk song and a family recipe are the same kind of object

This is where the music and the food actually meet. Neither a folk song nor a household dish has an authoritative version. There are some 3,600 Arirangs; there are as many kimchis as there are households, and every Korean cook will tell you that their mother's is correct and the neighbours' is not. [Kimchee](/blog/kimchee-not-just-another-pickle/) and [banchan](/blog/banchan-the-art-of-the-side-dish/) survive the way the song does - by being repeated and quietly altered - and both are judged by whether they feel right, not by whether they match a text.

Which is also why neither travels as a museum piece. What we cook in Wan Chai is Korean food cooked in Hong Kong, for sixty years, by people who live here. What BTS put in the bridge of *Body to Body* is Gyeonggi Arirang produced by Diplo. Neither is a preservation project. Each is the version that its own place and decade produced - which is precisely how one song reached 3,600 variations.

So the album and the restaurant carry the same name on purpose, for the same reason, sixty-two years apart. One of them will be at Kai Tak in March 2027. The other is here every day: a Korean family business on Hennessy Road since 1964, with Korean chefs and mostly Korean staff who have made Hong Kong home. Arirang is a song about carrying where you are from with you. In this kitchen that is not a metaphor. If the album is what brought you to the word, this is where you can eat it.