- What I love about coming to New York City
is that the Korean restaurants here are not just traditional
but they're forward thinking.
There are chefs like the ones at Jungsik
and here at Atoboy that are taking Korean ingredients
and Korean dishes and they're kind of rewiring them.
They're thinking about how we can push
the cuisine forward, and not just look back.
How is this chef taking Korean ingredients?
How is he taking ideas from his childhood
and then applying them in a fine dining setting?
And yet serving them for under $40 a person.
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- [Junghyun] I'm born and raised in Korea.
My palette is like total Korean.
I got inspiration from the Vietnamese food
and a lot from like, inspiration
from France, or also Spanish, you know?
- Let's go.
- It's the Dimchae!
- Ohhh...
(laughs)
- Just like a remote so you can choose what type
of kimchi when it's fermented.
Ohhh, this is our kimchi.
- Ooooohhh.
- So you can see the like different kinds of kimchi here.
- Yeah, let me try the ramps.
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Oh it's good! It's so funky. It's so good
and I love how the ramps, like the hit of the ramps
has been tempered and now it's just pure
(together) fermented funk.
- Yeah. And this is eggplant nice kimchi.
- Oh, it's nice.
- Yeah it's really juicy isn't it? Yeah.
- It almost has this almost kind of cooked tofu like
texture cause it kind of collapses as you start eating it.
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There's actually a set menu so for
$39 you can get three courses.
We're going to start out with some of the lighter dishes.
We have this lotus root, this pickled lotus root.
Which is actually a classic banchan.
Underneath the lotus root he has a little bit of this
silken tofu and he's mixed it up with some various sauces.
I'm going to take this in first.
MMMM. So he takes a little bit of chili oil and he
covers the top and there's a little bit of seaweed that
gives a little more Mommy flavor.
This is pretty standard issue banchan.
This a typical way that you would start out a meal
except that he undergirds it with this silken tofu.
I think it gives the dish a little bit more substance
something you can really enjoy as a first course.
Because banchan is something that you would have an
array of and since you're just eating one
you want a little more heft to it, a little more protein.
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When I asked Chef Junghyun about this
he was telling me that, "This is just like
my take on Yukhoe which is a classic Korean raw beef dish.
He doesn't really change it up too much except
for I think most saliently he uses the stinging nettle sauce
I like how you get a lot of crunch and a lot of
bright notes from the pickled radish.
There's a nice set of greenery here that you wouldn't
normally expect because I think when I have this dish
it's a little more decadent when you have it with
egg yolk, you just put a raw egg yolk in there
and you stir it up, and it has a lot more soy.
This is more, I guess it's taking it back a little bit.
You can get some of that beefiness.
I'm not sure this is really reinventing anything.
But if you've never had Yukhoe before it's
a little more approachable because it's not as salty
more sweetness, more vinegar-iness.
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The idea behind this was boribap.
Boribap is something that you can get at the start
of a meal and it is just steamed barley
and you mix it up with a little bit of doenjang
which is fermented soybean paste.
So he uses a little bit of, he calls it, Ssamjang aioli
So he makes an aioli with doenjang.
I'm going to take some of this
pickled onion for a bright note.
What you would traditionally do is you would
make a wrap out of it, you would take a perilla leaf,
take some barley oats, take some ssamjang,
and then you would put pork belly.
But here he's using pork jowl which is pretty
similar in texture it's a little fattier has less
meat but it keeps together really nicely.
He actually confits it and then he sears it on the pan.
And because he's using perilla powder to kind of
coat the whole thing, it gives you that
same feeling but without any of the greenery.
It becomes almost rich and risotto like with the aioli.
A little bit of onion... and then you've got that
seared pork jowl, see yeah you can see that
you've got that layer of the meat right there
and then there's the layer of fat right on top
and that's the part that gets seared.
That's delicious, I think this is my
favorite course of the whole thing.
That pork jowl, I mean Koreans love pork.
It's the essence of pork flavor in that jowl.
It's a complete bite, it's really everything
that you want from a Korean experience.
Really great modern dish.
This to me really encapsulates what Atoboy is about.
It's modern Korean food, but it's approachable.
It's fine dining but it's not going to break the bank.
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Thank you so much for watching and if you want to see
more of modern Korean food on display, click right here.