Three Billionaires Walk Into a Fried Chicken Restaurant

Fried chicken and beer is a combination that families, office workers and blue-collar laborers in South Korea love to share after a hard day at work. Billionaire tech magnates are not often mingling among them.

But hundreds of spectators and news cameras swarmed the area outside an everyday fried chicken restaurant in Seoul’s Gangnam district on Thursday to get a glimpse of the three: Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang; Samsung Electronics’ executive chairman, Lee Jae-yong; and Hyundai Motor Group’s executive chairman, Euisun Chung.

At the table, the trio, all celebrities in the business world, exchanged hugs, clinked glasses and linked their drinking arms to take shots of beer.

The chicken wings were “so good,” Mr. Huang said at the restaurant, where he referred to his seatmates casually as Jay, Mr. Lee’s English name, and E.S., short for Mr. Chung’s given name.

Their rare casual outing — which appeared staged for the public’s eye, as they sat down at a table by the windows facing the street — was especially unusual in South Korea, where top executives of conglomerates keep high standards of decorum and privacy. It signaled the deepened ties between Nvidia, an American chipmaker, with South Korea’s tech and auto industries.

Earlier, they appeared together at an Nvidia gamer festival nearby, where Mr. Huang suggested that a business deal between them would soon be announced.

On Friday, the three companies, the South Korean government and several other conglomerates announced that Nvidia would supply hundreds of thousands of graphics chips to advance the country in autonomous driving, semiconductor and robotics. This week, Nvidia’s value topped $5 trillion, making it the most valuable public company in the world.

Mr. Huang, 62, has made similar public appearances in Taiwan, his place of birth. There, the Nvidia executive has mingled with fans, posed for selfies and signed people’s computer chips, laptops and even the clothing of a woman who asked him to autograph her chest.

The chicken-and-beer outing — a popular after-work pairing known in Korean as chimaek — on Thursday was Mr. Huang’s first such occasion in South Korea. He was visiting the country for the first time in 15 years to meet business leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

A crowd formed outside the restaurant, a branch of South Korea’s Kkanbu Chicken franchise, with hundreds of people holding up their phone cameras and police officers blowing their whistles at the crowd while shouting at them not to push.

Nvidia made the reservation at the restaurant, where one of its employees was a regular, said Jung Kyongman, who leads Kkanbu Chicken’s management support team. When the restaurant found out that important visitors would be coming, staff members took extra care to clean the restaurant in advance, he said.

Their public appearance attracted major attention in South Korea, causing sales at the Kkanbu Chicken franchise to surge, Mr. Jung said. Fried chicken was sold out at some of its branches, he said.

“I’m just surprised at the sudden interest,” he said. “I had no idea there would be as many people as there were yesterday.”

When the billionaires arrived, Mr. Huang hung his signature black leather jacket on his chair and gave the two South Koreans 25-year-old Japanese Hakushu whiskey, worth thousands of dollars, and Nvidia’s new $4,000 mini computer, DGX Spark, which went on sale earlier this month, news footage showed.

“Are we going to have something to drink?” Mr. Huang asked. Mr. Lee, 57, called for beer in Korean: “Beer, beer.” Then he and Mr. Chung, 55, opened Mr. Huang’s gifts, with Mr. Lee showing off his to the news cameras.

A signed message from Mr. Huang to his two dinner companions read, “To our partnership and future of the world!”

Throughout the night, Mr. Huang periodically left the two South Koreans at the table and handed out gimbap, a popular Korean dish, banana-flavored milk and fried cheese sticks to the crowd.

When they finished dinner, one of them paid $1,800 for all of the customers who were there, Mr. Jung said.

“This is the best way to enjoy chimaek,” Mr. Huang said as the three posed for photographs before leaving.