The couple that fell in love, then opened one of Kansas City’s top restaurants
Snowflakes swirl around New York City streetlamps. As the sun falls, Johnny Leach steps out of his Brooklyn apartment and onto the wet street before ducking into the subway station.
He sees lights from the G train charging down the tunnel, its brakes screeching to a stop. Johnny counts the train cars, one-two-three-four-five-six, and the doors fly open. There sits pretty, dark-haired Helen Jo, just as she promised.
She looks at Johnny and smiles.
The employees at Michelin-starred restaurant Del Posto — he a master with food, she with pastries — have been penny-pinching to catch movies or giggle their way through art exhibits. The friends (or perhaps more) loop around sidewalks with recipe books tucked under their arms, dreaming about their one-day restaurants.
What would the budding lovebirds think if told they’d one day open a restaurant together? A nationally recognized restaurant, for that matter.
It’s been more than a decade since that New York City scene. The two don’t want to say exactly how long ago to avoid dating themselves, but it seems fresh as Helen Jo and Johnny Leach tell the story to The Star.
“On our days off we’d go on long walks and check out different spots around the city, kind of explore together,” Johnny said.
“It was very, in many ways, romantic,” Helen Jo agreed, sitting at his side.
The married couple discuss their love story inside their seasonally driven restaurant in Hotel Kansas City called The Town Company, which was recently nominated for the food world’s equivalent to an Academy Award. They’re both 2026 James Beard Award semifinalists.
Separately. Not just Johnny, not just Helen Jo.
Johnny’s the mastermind behind Town Co.’s courses, so he’s in the running for Best Chef: Midwest. Helen Jo makes the pastries, so she’s competing for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker.
It’s not the first time either has been mentioned. Helen Jo was a semifinalist last year, and this is Johnny’s fourth semifinal run in a row. Fingers crossed he or she will advance to the next round at the end of the month and fly to Chicago in June, where they’ll read the winners’ names.
Being in different categories, it’s possible both could win. And perhaps that wouldn’t be farfetched. Like things have been since they met, they do everything as a team.
Explaining how they felt when they first won the award, Helen Jo said they were partly distracted by the new restaurant they were about to open in Columbus Park, called Dear Donna.
But they were elated, of course. Johnny said he tries to take those announcements with a heaping side of humility.
“All the mix of emotions,” Helen Jo said. “Just happy for each other.”
The beginning of a partnership
Putting his arm around Helen Jo, Johnny leaned forward and explained that he hasn’t always loved food. Seriously.
If you can believe it, he was a picky eater until his early twenties.
But he was working at record stores in Portland when one of his friends began to dive deep into the food scene. He saw his friend’s contagious passion for the craft and developed a hunger for something new.
“That interest just grew and grew and grew,” he said.
He decided to shift gears and headed to culinary school in Eugene, Oregon, to learn how to cook. And in that case, perhaps being a picky eater was a good thing. He’d need a refined palate to make it in the business.
But like any chef at the time trying to start their career, he’d have to head to a major city like New York or Paris. The Big Apple sounded nice. He’d always wanted to live there.
Meanwhile, more than 2,000 miles away, Helen Jo grew up in a Korean-American household in Chicago.
Her family owned a Korean market, where Helen Jo would pull the scales off fish in the wee hours before school. The shop was where her cooking skills bloomed, but she quickly learned she had a taste for sweet rather than savory.
She “got her butt kicked,” as she tells it, in several NYC restaurants, even helping build famous bakery Milk Bar, which now has several locations and ships nationwide. She worked at fine dining restaurant Eleven Madison Park.
“I’m very fortunate to have a lot of experience and just take a lot of that background … and apply it to how we wanna operate our business,” she said.
When their paths crossed at Del Posto, new-hire Johnny noticed Helen Jo working in the kitchen.
“I saw Helen and really wanted to talk to her,” he remembered.
The chefs would occasionally ask the bakers to borrow their sugar container . To the pastry team’s annoyance, they’d frequently return it empty. But when Johnny asked to borrow the sugar container, he brought it back to Helen Jo completely filled.
Bonus points in her mind.
The two bonded over movies, music, and of course, food. They quickly began spending days off together, meeting in Union Square, between their apartments in Brooklyn and on the Upper East Side.
They’d nerd out about flavors and potential dishes. But they also got to know each other as friends, then more than friends.
“We were very dedicated to what we were doing, almost consumingly, but the time we were together was just spent enjoying ourselves,” Johnny said.
They dated for a few years before they got married at a restaurant they loved: Frankies 457. It’s tucked in Carroll Gardens, an Italian neighborhood where the 1987 film “Moonstruck” was filmed.
They served a mix of Korean and Mexican food — Johnny is part-Mexican — as a symbol of their unity.
‘Deceivingly simple’
Town Co. isn’t Mexican or Korean, though. There are subtle influences of both, but it’s more of a seasonal restaurant. It highlights cuisine from local farmers and purveyors. Food is cooked over an open flame, using the wood of Missouri white oak trees.
Farmers send the couple fresh sheets to let them know what’s new and up-to-standard. Then, they build a menu. The restaurant’s staff helps inform dishes, too.
“A lot of our food is just inspired by our team,” Helen Jo explained. “And also just things we grew up with that others might be attached to.”
The goal at Town Co. is to underpromise and overdeliver. Bread and rolls, for example, appear on the menu. Easy enough.
But Town Co. makes its own butter, cooks the rolls until they’re perfectly fluffy, and serves it with a carrot dip. The carrots are slow-roasted for eight hours over the hearth before they’re made into the mixture.
“The food is very simple, but also there’s a lot of technique and attention to detail with everything we put out,” Johnny said. “It’s kind of deceivingly simple.”
More popular menu items include the chile smoked pork chop ($72), beef tartare ($18) and lobster toast ($25).
On Helen Jo’s side, the black sesame almond cake with red wine poached pear and almond ice cream ($15) is a staple that will remain on the list. Other desserts include a cheesecake with smoked pecan brittle and spiced apple ($15) and sundae ($16) with brown butter blondie, cherry chocolate chip ice cream and salted candied cocoa nibs.
The menu rotates about twice a season. They’re constantly in close contact with suppliers, like Salt Creek Farms in Eureka, Kansas, about what to put on the plate.
Making a home in Kansas City
There’s plenty who ask Helen Jo and Johnny, “Why Kansas City?”
The pair have been successful in much bigger cities, with Johnny years ago opening a restaurant called Chalino in his hometown of Portland. Before that, he worked at Ma Peche and Momofuku in New York.
But somehow, someway, Johnny ended up in a meeting with big wigs involved in the Hotel Kansas City project.
“It was very random, and I was like, ‘Kansas City? What am I gonna do out there?’” Johnny recalled to The Star. But then he visited. “I remember being very surprised at how cool the city was. It reminded me of the Portland I grew up in.”
The pair began seriously discussing what living in Kansas City would look like. It seemed up-and-coming at the time, so they imagined what the town might look like five, 10 years down the road.
They were confident they were moving but told themselves that if the Chiefs won the 2020 Super Bowl, they’d make the jump. They anxiously watched from their Portland living room as Patrick Mahomes launched long touchdown passes.
As the game clock hit zero, red and yellow confetti fell onto the football field.
“We danced around and said, ‘We’re moving,’” Helen Jo. “There’s something more to come.”
Hotel Kansas City and Town Co. opened later that year.
“It felt like one last big adventure,” Johnny said.
Today, they live in Pendleton Heights, not far from their newest restaurant, Dear Donna, at 549 Gillis St. Kansas City is on track to where they’d envisioned it. There are many more upscale restaurants, and plenty of development on any side of the metro. Not to mention, the 2026 World Cup.
“You feel the love and support from the city, and we felt that here,” Helen Jo said. “We wanted to grow with it.”
Tattooed on both of their fingers is the letter “P.” That’s for their daughter, Perri Yoon, the other product of their love, besides their two restaurants.
The 11-year-old’s lunches consist of cheese sandwiches with olive tapenade, cucumber sandwiches and rice with nori. And, like lots of kids, she likes macaroni and cheese.
At home, the family still enjoys the simple joys of cooking. Helen Jo and Johnny trade off preparing dishes for each other, making salmon curry and tofu spinach salad. It’s a love language. And perhaps that’s how they’ve stayed in the cutthroat industry for so long.
“It’s a craft that brings people together,” Johnny said. “That’s what keeps me happy and inspired.”