Corey Lee’s inspired invention at Benu
This is Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer’s Between Meals column, an update of the restaurants he visits as he searches for the next Top 100 Restaurants. His main dining reviews, which include a ratings box, are written only after three or more visits.
It has been more than a year since I last visited Benu, and I knew that with each passing month since the restaurant opened in 2010, Corey Lee, who is Korean American, has delved deeper into his Asian heritage.
He opened Benu after serving as chef de cuisine for eight years at the French Laundry, and that training informed much of his cooking. Over the past seven years he’s increasingly exchanged French techniques for Asian.
On this visit it felt as if the transformation was complete. Benu no longer feels like a Western restaurant using Asian ingredients, but an Asian restaurant capitalizing on some of the best preparations and products in the world.
When we went back to the kitchen, which every table of diners is invited to do, Lee told us that when he looks back on the menu he was doing four years ago, the evolution surprises him. He explained more in a follow-up phone call.
When he left the French Laundry to open Commis a decade ago, the first dishes he worked on were reimagining two classic Chinese dishes, the thousand-year-old quail egg and the shark fin. For the latter, he wanted to create a dish with shark fin without the shark.
“I didn’t know where that would take me,’’ he said. “Over the years I’ve been able to understand that a little better. I changed from being curious about something to being fully committed to it.”
His commitment showed on every dish. Like his own journey, the meal started with the thousand-year-old quail egg, which has been on the menu from the start, but now has different accompaniments. Currently the egg is centered on a pad of preserved ginger puree surrounded by a vibrant green sauce made from cabbage juice.
Another signpost of Lee’s evolution is the asparagus stuffed inside bamboo fungi, looking much like a dumpling, surrounded by a sauce made from aged tangerine peel. Yet another example: Glazed squid that is barely cooked to bring out its creamy texture, then wrapped around blood sausage with pickled daikon and a sesame leaf peeking out at both ends. This could have been a very rustic dish, but it came across as subtle and elegant.
Lee does a takeoff on another staple: stuffed chicken wings. He uses an abalone filling, glazing the chicken skin with a mustard mixture that cements mustard flowers to the outside. Another dish is a barely set steamed egg-white custard studded with crab. It’s topped with thin slivers of ham and coated with a sauce made from chicken, ham and truffles. In the middle is a pile of house-made threads of faux shark fin. While many of these small bites reference familiar preparations, he re-envisions them so they are refined and complex.
All these delicacies, and a few others, arrived before the official eight-course menu ($295) began.
The first course is lobster coral soup dumplings, which has been on the menu for the last seven years. This is followed by a small bowl of rice presented with three small dishes: caviar and fresh-pressed sesame oil with shards of sesame leaf and daikon leaning on one side; sea urchin marinated with fermented crab sauce; and lightly cured horse mackerel balanced with fresh ginger and sake lees pickles.
The server next brings out a whole barbecued quail to display to the table, and when she returns the mostly boned bird is portioned and plated, accompanied by a dish of Chinese artichokes in black truffle sauce with red cabbage. Then comes an intense double consomme, with thin slices of mountain yam, that looks like an image from a 1960s
flower-power poster.
The main course is dry-aged rib steak and braised riblet, accompanied with small dishes that mimic what you might find in a Korean barbecue house. Those include tomato jam made from preserved summer tomatoes mixed with soybean paste and seasonings; a bowl of lettuces; a scallion salad; and winter kimchi with fresh pear juice, which is stuffed inside a hollowed-out pear and sliced.
The dessert was another brilliant reinvention of common Asian ingredients. Winter melon was made into a viscous soup with chrysanthemum flowers and leaves and a lightly frozen meringue whipped with cream.
Sommelier Yoon Ha has always created wine pairings that are on point, but in the past years he’s gotten more daring. I’ve been to dozens of great restaurants with exceptional wine personnel, and none have achieved the same synergy between the food and wine as you’ll find at Benu. Ha has the knack of offering often unexpected wines that blend perfectly with the food without diminishing the character of either. (The current pairing is $210.)
While Lee looks to Asia for inspiration, the menu is his own. He said he has been surprised at the number of Asian customers who’ve told him he gave them a new appreciation for ingredients they grew up with.
“I think we’re part of this larger movement of people trying to find something authentic,” he said. “It’s a confluence of our native culture and being American.”