How Kimbap Spot found a second pillar with delivery

You can feel the atmosphere as soon as you walk into Kimbap Spot in Bochum. The room is warm and busy, bowls move across the pass, and staff weave between tables. 

But there are also those cold, rainy Tuesdays. The kind where the food prep is done, the sauces are ready, the rice is hot and at 7:30 p.m., there are more empty tables than full ones.

The rent is due either way. The team is still there. The work has already been done. That’s the part people don’t see when they talk about running a restaurant. Kyung Ah Meiers, founder of Kimbap Spot in Bochum, has lived that rhythm for over seven years.

She didn’t open her restaurant to chase volume. She opened it because she loved Korean food, went vegan, and started cooking for friends. Pop-ups followed. Then, in 2018, her own place.

“What makes us special,” she says, “is that we have Korean soul food with a twist. Everything is colorful, handmade, plant-based.”

Extending her reach beyond her physical restaurant

Wolt became Kimbap Spot’s first delivery partner. She had previously tried organizing delivery herself, which meant managing systems and logistics on top of running the kitchen. With Wolt, the setup was straightforward, and she had a direct contact person from the beginning.

“From the start, I always had an account manager who was there for me.”

Orders came in, drivers arrived, and the system worked. But it didn’t take long before the team realized delivery wasn’t just an extra stream of orders. It changed the rhythm of the restaurant. “Sometimes the driver comes in three minutes,” she says.

Three minutes means tighter coordination. Orders have to be accepted consistently. Packaging has to be efficient. Pre-orders can stack up before dinner service officially begins.

“Our processes have changed,” she says. “We have to be more organized.” When she gives advice to other restaurant owners, Kyung is direct:

“If you start with delivery, you should really be ready. You should be able to accept the order and not always be offline, because then it doesn’t make any sense at all.”

When delivery became 50% of the evening 

The biggest shift wasn’t immediate growth, it was stability. “When the weather’s bad and people don’t want to go out, we’re still busy and can still generate revenue.”

On some evenings, orders through Wolt account for almost 50% of total revenue. Not every night, but often enough to change how the business feels. Inside the app, she’s also seen repeat behavior. “We have a lot of regular customers on Wolt. People who order at least once a week.”

Kyung has also experimented with promotions inside the Wolt app. “The big advantage is that you’re more visible,” she says. “It’s fairer than other platforms. You don’t have to buy your way to the top.”

When they promote products with healthy margins, like their Kimbap for Two plate, orders increase. “When things take off there, it can really get hectic,” she laughs. “In a good way.”

Loyalty in the restaurant and in the app

Kyung doesn’t describe delivery as a transformation, instead, she describes it as support. She has considered opening a smaller takeaway-focused location in the future. Knowing that a consistent stream of orders comes in during the evening changes the risk calculation.

“If I know that in the evening I already have X number of orders coming in via Wolt,” she says, “sometimes that’s almost 50% of our total revenue. That definitely takes a lot of pressure off.”

That’s the role delivery plays at Kimbap Spot. It’s not the whole business and not a replacement for dine-in. It’s a second pillar. 

And when the dining room is quiet, that pillar is important.