Chef’s memories of Korea inspire recipes

Chef’s Korean dishes inspired by ‘best-tasting food that I knew of’

Chef Hooni Kim eats out a lot when he’s in South Korea. And although he’s in the business of food — at the helm of New York restaurants Hanjan and Danji, which became the world’s first Michelin-starred Korean restaurant in 2012 — he doesn’t like to think too much when he’s at the table.

He considers eating an act of pure pleasure.

“That’s why I don’t enjoy eating at my restaurants — I’m always thinking and analyzing. It’s very stressful and you’re never content. I don’t dine out like that, especially in Korea, where it’s just so fun.

“When I come back, I rely on memory where the food has had enough impact that I can remember the flavours. I don’t remember because I want to cook it. I remember because I want to eat it again.”

Using his recollections as a springboard, Kim experiments with different techniques and ingredients. He likens the way he balances the traditional and the interpretive to passing food through a prism. Classic dishes refract, coming out at different angles.

Take tteokbokki, rice cakes in a spicy, vivid red gochujang sauce. Typically stewed until meltingly tender, the version he shares in the book (and on the Hanjan menu) has a soft interior, exceedingly crisp exterior and heady chili flavour.

Kim had his first bite of “almost violently good” tteokbokki while visiting his grandmother in Busan, and it made such a profound impression it remains his earliest taste memory.

He was just four or five years old, he recalls in the introduction to his debut cookbook, My Korea, written with Aki Kamozawa. Later, the popular street food became the inaugural item on his list of summer-vacation “must-eat” foods.

Born in Seoul and raised primarily in New York City, Kim trained at acclaimed restaurants Daniel and Masa. It was at Masa — the most exclusive sushi restaurant in the U.S. — that he began to establish his style of Korean cooking.

While he looked forward to eating Korean food on annual visits, he had little experience making it. At Masa, the family (staff) meals he prepared evolved into his first menu for Danji. He refers to the experience as a “complete rediscovery” of Korean food.

“Korean food in Korea was always the best-tasting food that I knew of,” says Kim. “I think Masa (Takayama) is the one who told me, ‘When you open your restaurant, you have to cook who you are.’

“It made me really look within to see, ‘What kind of chef are you?’ … That’s the most honest way to cook food, I think. When the answers are within.”

My Korea includes a Korean pantry primer and 90 recipes from his restaurants, with chapters devoted to fundamental sauces and condiments, banchan, kimchee, muchim (quick-pickled vegetables), soups and stews, rice, noodles, anju and snacks. Jangs and other preserved or aged ingredients are essential.

When he opened Danji in 2010, Kim says he felt like a New Yorker with a passion for Korean food.

“Definitely with my background,” Kim says, “it uses the best techniques I know to make the food the most delicious.” Recipes excerpted from My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes, with permission from the publisher, W.W. Norton & Co.