How Seoul’s fine dining chefs are merging the past and the present to create a legacy in Korean cuisine

Remember the days where the mention of Korean food conjured images of sour-spicy kimchi, instant ramyeons and vegetables tossed higgledy-piggledy with rice in claypots to be called bibimbaps? Not anymore.

You know a cuisine has achieved cult status when for two years in a row, the best restaurant in North America — according to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2023 and 2024 lists — is a Korean fine diner Atomix, run by Junghyun Park and his wife Ellia. Seoul’s Mingles also made it to the list this year, a first for a South Korean restaurant.

Chef Sung Anh of Mosu, which had first opened in San Francisco before relocating to Seoul and expanding to Hong Kong, also received the peer-voted Inedit Damm Chefs’ Choice Award in this year’s Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants accolades for his role in Korea’s gastronomic renaissance.

Even locals, who have often regarded their cuisine as more functional than aesthetic, are seeing their own food in a different light as chefs in Seoul peel back Korea’s multi-layered history to cultivate a deeper appreciation of their food traditions and practices.

Jun Lee is one of the stalwarts on Seoul’s fine dining scene. He opened two-Michelin starred Soigne in 2013, a novelty in its time as Lee applied his mostly American culinary training and experience to Korean ingredients. He reflected: “Eleven years is a very short time for Korea to witness a phenomenon that has created the modern Korean fine dining we see today and is now showing the world a new future.

“For locals, it feels like we've all witnessed the process of how Korean cuisine has gone from being just an expensive luxury to becoming an important part of global culture, like music and movies. It's like having a global language that never existed before.”

Even he had a eureka moment as he straddled tradition and innovation in his culinary journey. “I used to think that they were opposites,” he remarked. “Korean cuisine used to be described in terms of fermentation, represented by kimchi, doenjang (fermented soybean paste) and gochujang (fermented red chili paste).

“However, through studying old cookbooks and looking at food through the lens of the humanities, I concluded that traditional and modern food are not separate, but part of the same stream. It's how you look at food from different time periods. Once I had that perspective, I realised how silly it was to try to explain the whole thing with a single ingredient or feature.”

His “Bibim” dish, for example, has a savoury yet refreshing base of soymilk cream, caviar and fragrant Agastache oil accentuated in texture and flavour by a garland of seasonal herbs and barley sauce. A spritz of tomato essence over the botanical bowl completes what Lee calls the defining factor of Korean cuisine: Harmony.

He explained: “As a people who value harmony in all aspects of our diet, meat dishes were always accompanied by vegetables and side dishes called banchan. When you eat bibimbap, you add various ingredients according to your taste to create new combinations and mix them together to make one dish. It's not about the flavour of any ingredient, but rather the flavour of all the ingredients together.”

At 7th Door, which is ranked No.18 on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list and has one Michelin star, chef-owner Kim Dae Chun uses the cornerstones of Korean cuisine, ageing and fermentation, to enhance his dishes.

He shared: “Every year, we create 40 different fermented ingredients and sauces. We develop data to match the changing ingredients and temperatures each year. We are trying to put in a more systematic and scientific method of the fermentation process. Since tradition can fade with time, we create data to preserve our traditional aspects.”

The team makes their jangs (fermented sauces) from scratch, including the western-style ones such as tteokbokki that combines gochujang with truffles. Seasonal seafood, fruits and vegetables go into aeokjot (fish sauces), cheong (syrups) and jangajji (pickles).

Kim added: “These house-made condiments become the basis of all our dishes, whether it is Hanwoo (Korean beef) served with a sauce made from aeokjot or noodles using our dongchimi (a winter kimchi made with radish in brine water).”

Kim feels that the biggest misunderstanding among diners is that, in comparison with Europe or Japan, Korea lacks diversity in its ingredients and hence, there is not much to cook with. He countered: “Korea has four distinct seasons which is reflected in our cuisine, which is extremely diverse due to regional characteristics. Many dishes are unique to specific geographical locations as the Korean peninsula covers the sea and the mountains.

“While popular dishes like bibimbap and kimchi are well-known internationally, they are just a small part of Korean cuisine. There are so many different dishes starting from royal palace cuisine to very common everyday snack foods.”

Chefs Cho Eun Hee and Park Sung-bae, who opened Onjium as a restaurant and a Korean culture research institute in 2013, remarked that Korean cuisine is not easy to understand. The restaurant has a Michelin star since 2020 and has risen from No. 30 (2022) to No. 21 on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

They said: “There is a prejudice that Korean food is not delicate and has strong flavours. However, our traditional royal court and noble family cuisine have traditionally been mild, deep and pure in taste. We serve such food, offering an experience of traditional Korean cuisine that may even be unfamiliar to Koreans. Over time, its value seems to be increasingly recognised by local diners.”

Cho, who was trained in the royal cuisine of the Joseon dynasty, uses an old recipe for the restaurant’s Tomato Eungi, where milk is added to tofu made from soybeans to create a cheese-like flavour, achieving a “modern” taste with traditional methods.

Their Duteop Pie is a riff on the traditional Korean sweet duteop tteok that was served on the Korean king’s birthday but is made with pie dough instead of rice cake dough. Cho explained: “While traditional methods used primitive cooking tools, Onjium modernises these traditions by using the latest cooking equipment to ensure that these traditions can be preserved and continued.”

She and Park plan to continue with their fermentation studies, especially with vegetables and alcohol, and to organise collaborations that foster the growth and understanding of Korean culture.

Studying the past to understand and enhance the present is also the philosophy behind one Michelin-starred Yun Seoul’s chef-founders Kim Do-yun and Song Hongyoon. Their signature noodles made from Korean wheat, organic flour and legumes, and served with perilla seed oil, have a purity and simplicity that harken to a time before the Korean War where there was no wheat, and noodles were made from buckwheat, soybeans and starch. The comfort dish had a natural aroma and no additives.

Song explained: “We want to bring out more aroma and flavour from ingredients through aging, fermentation, and drying and create a different texture — that is what comfort food should be like.”

The duo is starting a research institute to study local ingredients and the processes of drying, maturation, and fermentation. Song shared: “In Korea, there are many ingredients with unique regional characteristics that even Koreans are not familiar with. Also, Korean ingredients these days are being cultivated cheaply and quickly, losing their original aroma and taste. We hope to work with farmers to find out how to grow them in a better way.”

The community connection is also what drives Joseph Lidgerwood, an Australian chef who fell in love with the Korean culture and moved to Seoul eight years ago, to spend a good part of each year visiting producers to learn about their crops and finding ways to highlight their versatility.

He opened his restaurant Evett in 2019 to push the creative boundaries of Korean ingredients and it has retained its one Michelin-star status since 2020.  He said: “Deconstructing dishes or making samgyetang different is not really the point of what we do. What we want to do is showcase an ingredient in a different way beyond how it’s been used for hundreds of years.” One of the dishes in his tasting menu is a strawberry gochujang combined with fruit leather to create a cross between an Australian fruit roll and jjondeugie, both popular childhood snacks. The translucent roll is then wrapped around a shrimp for a play-off between sweetness and acidity.

The possibilities are endless, the future looks exciting. Soigne’s Lee shared: “This new culinary revolution is creating hope and excitement about how Korean cuisine can be reinterpreted, and how the concept of Korean cuisine, which we didn't even know clearly, can be even greater than we thought.”

My hope though, is that as Korean cuisine hurtles towards fame and glamour, its uniqueness will be preserved. Its beauty lies in its deep connection with nature’s life cycles, living — often patiently — in the moment and making the best of it.

For example, much like winemaking, no one knows how a jang or kimchi would taste at the end. Textures and flavours change at the different fermentation stages and there are no right or wrong decisions in determining when it is at its most ideal for consumption. More importantly, the creation process was often a communal activity that brought people together in conversations and memories.

This was the recurring theme in several hansik (Korean traditional foods) sessions organised by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, and Korean Food Promotion Institute in conjunction with the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants ceremony, which was held in Seoul.

As she hand-mashed cooked soybeans and folded whole cabbages with their fermentation marinades in her demonstration of jang and kimchi making, chef Cho Heesook, who was named Best Female Chef in 2020, shared that these quintessential staples were traditionally homemade. These days, with smaller homes and busier lifestyles, they are often store bought. Still, every household had their preferred preparation methods and favourite ingredients, resulting in unique variations that tell of family bonds and rituals.

For kimchi, the main ingredient has traditionally been cabbage, but latter-day versions include tomatoes and beet root. There are also unfermented versions known as geotjeori. Purists may be aghast at their inclusion, but Cho feels they are acceptable definitions of kimchi. Her rationale? Modern evolutions don’t negate foundations. She commented: “If you think about it, fresh kimchi represents the beginning of the fermentation process.”

To Jeong Kwan, the Buddhist nun who shot humble vegetarian temple food to international fame in the Netflix Chef’s Table documentary, cooking is recognising how ingredients should be treated, and eating is a self-discovery journey — "you create yourself from what you eat”. She has no recipes nor measuring cups. Instead, she gauges the “energy” in ingredients to determine their usage: Young vegetable shoots are tossed into salads, while spring vegetables like chwi-namul — whose leaves become larger in May —  are boiled, dried and fermented. Only natural flavourings are used, such as perilla oil, mushroom powder and persimmon vinegar.

In her workshop, Kwan, who had learned cooking solely by observing her temple seniors in the kitchen and experimenting on her own, braised soy sauce-glazed shiitake mushrooms in rice syrup and pan-fried doenjang mujeon (soybean paste and radish pancakes).  We had them along with lotus leaf rice and yakgwa (honey cookies) for lunch, delicious fare that brimmed with natural goodness and the caress of condiments brushed on in perfect proportions. In that moment, temple food feels like the philosophical roots that ground Korean cuisine to its raison d’etre: To use nature’s bounty to heal, connect and revive. That’s what I hope a cuisine will always be, no matter how lauded it may become.