Sekki Pop-Up — The Leo Grand, Bauernmarkt, the 1st

• Indoor
• Restaurant
• Pop-up
• Japanese-Austrian
• the 1st
• Fri–Sun evenings
• Until end of August

Lucas Shong and Jake Bergholtz arrived at Sekki with nearly a decade of Vienna between them — Shong at Café Kandl, Bergholtz at Kandl, DasDrittl, and Salzamt, plus a stretch in Korea. They're the kind of chefs who don't perform their food. They cook what they've learned, what they have access to, what makes sense to eat right now.

The name is Korean — sekki can mean "puppy" or, more colloquially, "you idiot." There's a deliberate lightness in that choice, a refusal to take themselves too seriously. The Leo Grand's restaurant space is baroque and ornate, almost aggressively so; rather than strip it back, they're playing with that energy. "It's genuinely kitsch," they told Gault Millau, "and we love it."

What You'll Actually Eat

The menu changes based on what suppliers bring them, but certain things are locked in: Kittseer sourdough from baker Pierre Reboul, liver crème brûlée, cevapcici, Korean fried chicken variations, and apricot dumplings from Bergholtz's grandmother Mimi's recipe. Butter arrives shaped like a duck — a souvenir from Bergholtz's time in Korea. They call it "stoner food for adults," which is both a joke and accurate.

The wine list is deliberately small and rotating, mixing natural and classically made bottles. Both have spent years building networks across Vienna's wine scene; this is the first time they're using that network for their own thing.

Why It Matters

Sekki works because it's temporary. A pop-up gives them permission to experiment without the weight of permanence, to build something that feels like a conversation rather than a statement. Shong and Bergholtz are exactly the kind of chefs who thrive in that space — generous with their knowledge, unselfconscious about their influences, genuinely interested in feeding people well rather than impressing them.

They're also representative of a shift in Vienna's food scene: young cooks who've worked everywhere, cooked with everything, and now want to do something that's theirs. Sekki is that thing, at least for the summer. After August, they're talking about a break. In the ideal case, they said, something continues elsewhere.