Korean food gets Michelin-star makeover in Seoul restaurants : NPR

SEOUL, South Korea — How do you reinterpret a easy conventional dish into meals that wins awards and instructions a excessive value at a effective eating restaurant? Here is an instance:

For a closing course at Evett, a restaurant in Seoul’s stylish Gangnam district, Australian chef Joseph Lidgerwood grills a piece of Korean beef over a wooden fireplace.

Then, he distills a reasonable bowl of white rice and a dollop of brown doenjang — a paste of salty, fermented soybeans — decreasing them to a small white puree with brown stripes, to accompany the meat.

Lidgerwood confesses that “the factor that I all the time wrestle with at effective eating eating places is that typically it by no means tastes pretty much as good as the normal Korean stuff.”

He says he asks himself, “this tastes superb, how can we carry this again to Evett? How can we make this right into a dish that may be served at a location like this?”

Whereas foreign-run, Evett is a part of Seoul’s burgeoning gastronomic scene pushed largely by South Korean cooks.

Their success in fine-tuning Korean meals helped them scale the heights of haute delicacies, including the style of success to the various different trophies of South Korea’s cultural energy.

And en path to the highest, Korean cooks and their creations have gotten a robust enhance from different South Korean cultural exports, which have whetted worldwide appetites for different Korean cultural genres.

In New York, two of 12 Michelin star awards final yr, and three of 19 in 2022, went to Korean eating places.

“One thing that I by no means thought would occur in my lifetime, particularly to Korean meals, is occurring,” muses Cho Hee Sook, sometimes called the “Godmother of Korean delicacies.”

She obtained her begin within the Nineteen Eighties, when the one effective eating in South Korea was in inns, and cooks had been thought-about a lowly occupation.

The rise of haute Korean delicacies

Evett, in the meantime, has been listed within the Michelin Information since 2020, with one star for its high-quality cooking.

Lunch at Evett prices about $114 per particular person, dinner about $119, not together with wine.

“I am not from Korea, however I’ve a love affair with Korean components,” says Evett’s chef Lidgerwood. His purpose with all his dishes, he says, is “to current them in several methods, to make folks form of look again on the previous.”

Considered one of his signature creations, for instance, is a “Meju doughnut.” Meju is a beige brick of dried, fermented soybeans, from which three elementary components of Korean delicacies — soy sauce, fermented soybean paste and chili paste — are made.

The brick is there to point out you one thing about how Korean meals is made. What you eat is a ball perched atop the block, a donut made with caramelized cream, anchovies and black garlic, and a dusting of powdered meju on prime.

One other course is served in a dish made to appear like a conventional Korean hat, full of radishes and onions cooked in Korean makgeolli liquor and abalone, and topped with a perilla seed cracker.

There is a picket Korean window body that holds sweets together with a ginseng marshmallow and a sesame oil caramel.

Lidgerwood’s dishes mirror Korea’s conventional use of seasonal components, supplemented by taking recent meals and preserving them by way of fermentation. Some he acquires on his roughly dozen annual foraging journeys round South Korea.

“We’ve got an incredible library of fermented stuff that we are able to pull and decide as we select,” he says.

A lot of Lidgerwood’s dishes cater to Koreans’ love of meals which are concurrently candy and salty. Many others have a creamy consistency extra like European delicacies than Korean.

However chef Junghyun Park, chef and proprietor of the two-Michelin-starred Atomix and three different New York eating places, says that, for him, not less than, Korean haute delicacies is just not about adapting conventional Korean meals to swimsuit Western palates.

“I like cooking in New York as a result of folks there are very open to new cultures,” he explains. “They like accepting new issues. So it isn’t like I’ve to alter to their tastes.”

In different phrases, he simply serves what he thinks tastes good. And he additionally dismisses the notion that Korean cooks have all of the sudden burst upon the worldwide effective eating scene.

“All of them began cooking across the early 2000s, like myself,” he says, “and have skilled as cooks for practically 20 years, growing their very own culinary kinds. I feel such efforts at the moment are bearing fruit.”

Conventional dishes with a contemporary twist

Chef Cho Hee Sook says one in all her fundamental goals is to replace conventional Korean delicacies to mirror trendy existence.

Conventional Korean meals are centered on rice, served with facet dishes known as banchan.

As a consequence of each publicity to overseas meals, and health-conscious efforts to chop carbs, she says, “increasingly individuals are excluding rice from their desk now and having what would have been banchan as standalone dishes.”

Many banchan and different conventional Korean meals make liberal use of soy sauce, chili paste and fermented soybean paste, so as to add taste to the tasteless rice.

“With out rice, these flavorings are too salty,” Cho says. “However as you attempt to assemble a effective eating course with out rice, you soften the flavour of the normal fermented pastes.”

And, she provides, out of concern for hygiene, particularly since COVID-19, many Korean eating places at the moment are serving meals in particular person parts, relatively than shared dishes in the course of a desk, one other development mirrored in Korean haute delicacies.

A rising tide of Korean cultural exports

A key ingredient within the success of Korean haute delicacies is the rising tide of different South Korean cultural exports, from Okay-pop bands together with BTS and BLACKPINK to motion pictures like Parasite and the TV collection Squid Recreation.

And South Korea’s authorities and companies are pondering of the way to advertise Korean meals overseas and revenue from it.

“Our final purpose is to extend publicity of Korean meals abroad and thru that, improve exports of Korean agricultural and meals merchandise,” explains Yang Joo-pil, an official in command of meals business coverage on the Ministry of Agriculture, Meals and Rural Affairs.

To do that, his ministry is discovering methods to hyperlink Korean meals to different aspects of Korean tradition.

“For instance, we choose about 10 meals objects annually for product placements in dramas,” he says, referring to TV exhibits. Additionally they promote Korean meals at Okay-pop live shows abroad.

South Korea’s largest meals firm, CJ Meals, in the meantime, goals to promote extra of its frozen dumplings, chili paste, kimchi and different foodstuffs abroad, by cultivating rising younger cooks like Evett’s Lidgerwood.

Lidgerwood’s culinary choices are wealthy in culinary data. Placing that a lot cultural content material “may look like a whole lot of work, for individuals who aren’t as taken with assembly the cow and the farmer,” he quips.

“However for us it is a form of a pleasure,” he provides. “In order that’s why we stand up each morning.”

Jen Kwon and Se Eun Gong contributed to this report in Seoul.