The Most Exciting Restaurant Trend in America

The Gourmet staff used to laugh at me because every time some reporter asked about The Next Big Thing in restaurants I invariably answered “Korean”. This was, you understand, before David Chang and Roy Choi made Korean cooking cool. Everybody thought I was out of my mind.

As this article from the San Francisco Chronicle attests, I fell in love with Korean food in the early seventies when I became friends with a terrific Korean cook. But my appreciation for Korean cooking really ramped up when I moved to Los Angeles in 1984. I lived near Koreatown, and although I loved the many noodle and barbecue places, my go-to restaurant was Beverly Soon Tofu. (The restaurant closed during the pandemic, but many of us are fervently hoping it will reopen). Then I moved to New York in the early nineties, and one of the very first restaurants I reviewed at the New York Times was Kang Suh. This so startled the Korean community that two Korean newspapers called to interview me about it.

It’s taken thirty years, but my prediction has finally come true: Korean food is now a very big deal in America. This week The Fifty Best Restaurant List was released, and only three American restaurants were on it: Atomix at 33, Le Bernardin at 44 and Singlethread at 50.

When Atomix first opened four years ago, I became an immediate fan. This is what I wrote after my first meal:

You leave Atomix with a deck of cards, a gorgeous kind of Tarot set, each one devoted to a dish you have eaten. In another restaurant this might seem like a gimmick, but at this serene almost contemplative restaurant it is something much rarer: it is pride.

JungHyun and Ellia Park are too ambitious to simply offer you food: they want you to ingest their culture. You sit at their spare but luxurious ten seat counter and each course tells a tale of Korea; by the time this deliriously delicious evening comes to a close you have a new respect for this complex cuisine. And – if you’re me – an enormous desire to learn more.

You could, of course, just go and eat the food.  Everything we had was artful, beautifully presented, and exciting.

The meal builds. This first course – a roasted burdock soup – was filled with intriguing and unfamiliar flavors.  What you are looking at is a preserved Korean plant, mugwort oil, and a little nugget of fishcake. That fishcake, made in house, was unlike any I’ve tasted before. I wanted more. A lot more.

The next course was hoe – raw fish – and it was stunning.  The card tells you that the inspiration came from a poem talking of “fish tossed in golden gleam.”  That poem becomes sea bream  marinated in tangerine vinegar, then topped with a gelatin made of soy sauce, Japanese uni and a bit of chrysanthemum.  The flavors were subtle and slightly teasing, the gentleness of the fish underscored by the bitter leaves, the spicy citrus, and the opulence of uni.

A fried course.  One elegant langoustine topped with uni-nasturtium cream.  But there was another flavor prickling my tongue, hovering at the very edge of consciousness, dancing in and out.  It was a seed pod called chopi, used in Korea before peppers arrived on their shores. (The Japanese call it sansho.)

Now we come to the one course that didn’t work for me.  I love caviar – and this was everything osetra should be – slightly fruity, rounded, a gentle pop in the mouth.  But it was overwhelmed by the lovely freshness of the cheese curd, so soft and sexy, so richly milky. That curd was so seductive – a textural magician – I barely noticed the caviar.

This is the chef’s idea of pancakes.  If you’ve spent any time around Korean food you’ve undoubtedly encountered the pajeons – savory pancakes.  Here the cake becomes a shadow of itself, a thin crepe embracing golden eye snapper.

But there’s another elusive flavor here, and I worry at it, trying to identify the taste.  It is, it turns out, a rare Korean soy sauce, the balsamic vinegar of the country if you will, which has been slowly fermented for at least five years.  The resulting elixir is not just salty; it is round, proud – the taste of time.

It was served with the most extraordinary little bowl of rice. The rice, each grain distinct, was mixed with seaweeds, sesame oil and topped with a tender little cloud of tofu.

A tidbit, one tiny bite of eggplant with eel mousse. On the side, a poached oyster with kimchi. The ceramics are all lovely, and the cards identify each artist.

Chef Park displays a whole turbot, first grilled then poached. When it next appears it is in a chrysanthemum sauce. I’ve always thought of chrysanthemum as a rather grumpy flavor, but here it actually smiles.

“If I were to provide the one word that best describe the true Korean flavor, I would undoubtedly say fermentation,” the chef writes on the next menu card. That is the point of this plate: the little cubes of wagyu have been marinated in fermented fruit juice.  On the side, fermented wasabi leaves, preserved garlic, ramps, dried seafood.  And more in the panchan: preserved radish, cucumber, cabbage. No more than a few tiny bites, but each one eloquent.

As the meal eases toward dessert there is shaved ice with strawberries and creme fraiche. What makes this dish interesting is the coriander and black pepper rocketing through the sweetness.  If you could bite into the first few days of spring, this is how it would taste.

This looks simple, but there’s so much work in this little dish of rice ice cream with pickled sprout honey.  That unfamiliar flavor?  It turns out to be a pudding made of the scorched rice left at the bottom of the rice pot. 

This was the most provocative and exciting meal I’ve had in a very long time. I’m ready for my next lesson in Korean cuisine; I can hardly wait for the next menu.

Atomix is tiny and expensive, but the Parks also own Atoboy, which offers a glimpse of their extraordinary cooking for a lot less money.

Four years ago, when I wrote that, high end Korean cooking was rare. But these days so many talented Korean chefs have opened restaurants it’s often hard to decided where to eat. In New York, Hooni Kim is doing fantastic work at Danji and Hanjan. Sangchul Shim is wowing crowds at Mari and Kochi. (If you want to see my latest meal at Mari, you can find it on my Instagram feed).

Los Angeles has long been a bastion of great traditional Korean cooking, but now innovative restaurants are opening there as well. Baroo, sadly, is no more, but the exciting Yangban Society is forging a new path for Korean food.

As for San Francisco: Seoul Garden, which I wrote about in the eighties, is still there. But the exciting news is San Ho Won ; Tejal Rao’s piece in the New York Times made me want to make a reservation and book a flight.

That soy sauce Chef Park uses? The best source I’ve found is Gotham Grove, which stocks a number of Korean soy sauces of various ages. Quite different than the soy sauces of other countries, these emphasize fermentation rather than salt. Eaten on their own they’re rather funky, but combined into a dish they acquire a wonderful roundness.

Incidentally, Gotham Grove also sources various kinds of seaweeds and really wonderful sesame and perilla oils.