When Atoboy celebrated its 10th anniversary in July, more than 300 people gathered at Rockefeller Center to mark the occasion. For owners Junghyun “JP” and Ellia Park, who moved to New York City from Seoul in 2012 and have, in the years since, built Atoboy and Atomix into two of the city’s most influential Korean restaurants, the celebration also marked 14 years of life together in New York. And it illuminated something else: a period in which New York’s relationship with Korean cuisine has fundamentally changed.
That’s not to say that Korean food suddenly landed on the city’s streets in the past decade, or that New York food enthusiasts were ignorant of it until recently. Korean food’s history in the city stretches back generations, through immigrant communities in Queens and New Jersey and the restaurants that eventually transformed the area surrounding Manhattan’s West 32nd Street into Koreatown. What changed over the past 15 years wasn’t the presence of Korean food; it was New Yorkers’ relationship to it.
Food once cooked largely by and for Korean communities gradually moved beyond those neighborhoods. Diners learned more about its dishes and ingredients, chefs began opening eateries outside of Koreatown, and fine dining expanded what those restaurants could look like. Eventually, Korean flavors and techniques became familiar enough that chefs weren’t constantly translating them or restrained by them.
The Parks’ story sits near the center of that transformation, but rests on groundwork laid decades earlier by Korean immigrant communities—and more recently, by chefs who pushed the cuisine beyond Koreatown.
“When I was young, 32nd Street, Broadway and Fifth Avenue were not Koreatown,” Hooni Kim, the chef and owner behind acclaimed restaurants Danji and Meju, tells Observer. As Korean businesses populated the neighborhood, restaurants followed, often featuring expansive menus designed to satisfy Korean immigrants hungry for the breadth of a cuisine they couldn’t easily find elsewhere.
Back then, “Koreatown was full of Koreans. That’s where Koreans went,” Kim says. Today, he believes the ratio has flipped, with non-Korean diners often outnumbering Korean patrons.
For Righteous Eats founder Jaeki Cho, any discussion of Korean fine dining that begins with Michelin stars misses what made those stars possible. Since the influx of Koreans to New York in the mid-1960s, restaurants in Manhattan and Korean enclaves in Queens, including Elmhurst and Flushing, haven’t made it a practice to court the critics. They’ve been feeding their communities.
“The fine dining story can’t exist without the immigrant small-business story,” Cho says. “They’re really the same story, just told from opposite ends.”
By the early 2000s, something was changing. Korean American chefs were beginning to command attention outside traditional Korean restaurants. David Chang’s Momofuku, which opened in 2004, warrants a place in this history, albeit with one caveat: Chang wasn’t primarily cooking Korean cuisine. Hooni Kim emphasizes Momofuku’s early Japanese-American identity, beginning with a name that paid homage to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen.
Chang’s confidence, however, was different. He was a Korean American chef asserting the value of Asian flavors and ingredients on his own terms. Cho sees that confidence as crucial: ingredients and preparations long undervalued as “ethnic” food could be presented—and priced—with the same seriousness as European cooking.
But the more consequential shift for Korean cuisine itself came a few years later, when chefs began taking Korean food beyond the geographical—and cultural—boundaries of Koreatown.
In 2010, Hooni Kim opened Danji in Hell’s Kitchen. At the time, he remembers few Korean restaurants operating in Manhattan outside Koreatown. Danji was significant not simply because it was another Korean restaurant, but because it actively broadened the audience for Korean food in New York.
After working at Daniel and Masa, Kim couldn’t find a Korean restaurant that displayed the same rigor he experienced in French or Japanese kitchens. He wanted to show his cooks that they could create Korean cuisine with the same level of technique and skill.
“I wanted to feel the pride of cooking every day,” Kim says. And for him, that only came from cooking Korean food.
Danji’s original menu reflected the audience Kim was trying to reach. One section offered recognizable classics; another included more interpretive dishes—sliders, fried chicken wings, kimchi paella—that gave diners who might have been unfamiliar with Korean food a point of entry. “The education,” as Kim describes it, was introducing people to Korean flavors while making everything surrounding those flavors feel comfortable.
That combination—Korean food moving beyond Koreatown while becoming more legible to non-Korean diners—was an important step in changing New York’s relationship with the cuisine.
A year later, in 2011, Jungsik Yim opened a New York outpost of his Seoul restaurant Jungsik, bringing an explicitly ambitious vision of contemporary Korean fine dining to the city. If Danji demonstrated that Korean food could thrive beyond Koreatown, Jungsik proved Korean cuisine could occupy the same rarefied fine-dining territory long associated with French and Japanese kitchens.
The restaurant became a critical proving ground for Korean cuisine at the highest level of dining. It earned a Michelin star within a year of opening, and a second star a year later. Since 2024, it has held three Michelin stars.
At the same time, Korean food was finding new entry points outside of fine dining. With the exception of Danji, chef Esther Choi, like Kim, remembers seeing very few Korean restaurants beyond Koreatown.
Choi was 28 when she opened Mokbar in Chelsea Market in 2014. Her concept—marrying Korean flavors with ramen—offered a gateway into the cuisine at a moment when the ramen boom Chang popularized a decade earlier was undergoing a bit of a renaissance. Her pitch to Chelsea Market’s leasing team was a “go big or go home” sort of moment.
“This is the start of the wave,” Choi remembers telling them, “and you’d better get in on it now because if not, you’re going to miss out.” At the time, ramen shops like Ivan Ramen and the now-closed Mu Ramen were consistently packed, with lines down the block, rain or shine. Choi says the team knew very little about Korean food. A decade later, that same conversation is strange to imagine.
Choi attributes some of the current fascination with Korean culture to the rise of K-pop, film, television and beauty within the mainstream, but those concepts alone can’t fully explain it. “In the end, the product has to be good,” she says. “Korean food is undeniably delicious.”
Writer, chef and bar owner Irene Yoo recalls sensing a shift around 2012 and 2013, when she began hosting Korean food and drink pop-ups that introduced crowds to soju, one of Korean culture’s most iconic drinks. Growing up Korean American often meant encountering people whose primary frame of reference for Korea was simply the question of North Korea or South Korea. By the time she started her pop-ups, people recognized kimchi, and gochujang no longer required a tutorial.
Yoo also noticed a distinct lack of Korean women in prominent professional chef roles. Her own relationship with Korean food was overwhelmingly female, passed on through mothers and grandmothers. When Choi opened Mokbar, it offered another kind of representation: that of a female Korean chef doing something “new and different and interesting, but also uniquely Korean.”
Korean food was no longer confined to Koreatown or to a certain type of restaurant. More importantly, diners once less familiar with the cuisine were gaining enough experience with its flavors that chefs could begin their conversations much further along.
That was the New York that JP and Ellia Park encountered when they arrived in 2012. JP had worked for Jungsik in Seoul before moving to New York to become chef de cuisine at its Manhattan restaurant. He credits both Yim and Hooni Kim with opening the door. By the time the Parks opened Atoboy in 2016, the work of introducing New Yorkers to Korean cuisine was already well underway. They saw an opportunity to expand what diners thought Korean cuisine could be.
During his first few years in New York, JP remembers Korean cuisine remaining strongly associated with bulgogi, barbecue and bibimbap. “We really wanted to educate the audience [about] how they can enjoy Korean food better and how diverse Korean cuisine [is].”
Atoboy took banchan, the small dishes fundamental to Korean dining, and reimagined their possibilities within a chic, contemporary New York restaurant. Two years later, the Parks opened Atomix, an elaborate tasting-menu restaurant that became one of the world’s most acclaimed.
Choi credits the Parks with elevating Korean food to a high-end experience, while Jaeki Cho notes they gave the cuisine a language of luxury. Beyond earning global accolades, Atomix proved that Korean food no longer needs validation through comparison to other culinary traditions.
Restaurateur Simon Kim took things a step further at Cote, blending the energy of Korean barbecue with the premium beef, wine and polished hospitality of an American steakhouse.
Korean food is no longer confined to casual, budget-friendly barbecue joints in Koreatown. Instead, the cuisine has expanded beyond a neighborhood and the diaspora, proving it can encompass everything from comfortable home cooking to a highly technical, high-end menu.
As Korean cuisine became more established, chefs felt a new sense of freedom: they didn’t have to precisely define where Korean cooking ended and where another tradition began.
Chef Jae Jung describes herself as “Seoul-born, NOLA-trained and NYC-refined.” At Kjun, which she opened as a permanent restaurant in 2022, her Korean flavors intersect naturally with the Cajun and Creole traditions that have become part of her culinary identity.
“I am a chef from Korea that has been cooking in America for a long time,” Jung says. “It feels unnecessary to focus on reducing the food to just one ethnicity or nationality.”
Korean cuisine’s influence in New York can no longer be measured solely by the number of Korean restaurants. Its ingredients and techniques have become part of the city’s broader culinary vocabulary. Jung points to Korean fermentation techniques appearing in new sauces, preparations and even cocktails.
As boundaries blur, chefs are moving in the opposite direction—returning to their roots to deepen their connection to Korean tradition.
For much of the past 15 years, Hooni Kim argues, celebrated Korean chefs have largely been cooking an interpretive version of Korean food. His tiny Long Island City tasting counter, Meju, represents a deliberate counterargument: traditional Korean food, he insists, can be fine dining “without [things like] caviar and the truffles.”
In June, 16 years after Kim first ventured beyond Koreatown with Danji, Meju earned him the 2026 James Beard Award for Best Chef New York State.
For Kim, the evolution of Korean food extends beyond fine dining. The sprawling 100- or 200-item menus once essential for serving immigrant communities are giving way to restaurants devoted to a handful of dishes, a model closer to how people actually eat in Korea.
The shift reflects a striking progression: New Yorkers once less familiar with Korean cuisine are moving beyond simply learning the dishes and ingredients to understanding the rituals and traditions behind them. Fueled by exposure to the Korean food scene in Los Angeles or Korea, dining expectations have skyrocketed.
“If you’re cooking Korean food in New York City or even L.A., you’re going to be compared to [a meal] in Korea,” Kim says.
And Korean cuisine is moving beyond restaurants altogether.
Choi, who once had to convince Chelsea Market that Korean food was the next wave, is on a mission to push it further into the mainstream. This summer, she launched Sessy, a pantry line of Korean staples, and in October, she will publish her first cookbook, rooted in her grandmother’s cooking. After immigrating to South Jersey, Choi’s grandmother grew Korean vegetables from seeds she brought from Korea because many of the ingredients she needed weren’t available there. “I owe my entire career to my grandmother,” Choi says. Bringing the pantry and book to life, for her, represents a full-circle moment for how far Korean food has come in this country, and in New York, in particular.
Yoo has also opened another door: one into Korean drinking culture. She opened Orion Bar, a Korean bar in Brooklyn, in 2024, and a year later, published Soju Party, a James Beard Media Award-winning cookbook and guide focused on Korean drinking culture and cocktails. There’s an audience that is increasingly interested not merely in Korean dishes, but in the culture surrounding them. What began as familiarity with kimchi and barbecue has become curiosity about fermentation, pantry ingredients, soju and the ways Koreans actually eat and drink.
For JP and Ellia Park, the impact of the past several years and the rising interest in Korean culture matter more than the accolades. They’ve watched diners leave their restaurants wanting to travel to Korea and explore the culture further. Next year, they plan to open a Korean barbecue restaurant in London. They believe the people there are less familiar with Korean cuisine and that they remain several steps behind the U.S. in its exposure and understanding of the culture. They are not exporting Atomix or Atoboy 2.0; they are deliberately starting with something new, yet elemental.
“We want to be Korean culture ambassadors,” JP says.
Fifteen years after Hooni Kim and Jungsik Yim began rewriting New York’s expectations, and a decade after Atoboy, Korean cuisine has earned the ultimate freedom: it no longer has one obvious path to follow.
Hooni Kim may dig deeper into tradition, while Jae Jung rejects tiny boundaries. Choi puts the Korean pantry into American homes, while the Parks take their vision to Europe. And restaurants can specialize in a single dish rather than attempt to represent an entire cuisine.
New Yorkers are already regarded as some of the world’s most sophisticated diners, and many brought knowledge of—or enthusiasm for—Korean cuisine to this evolution. That familiarity gave chefs room to deepen the conversation, challenge expectations and push the cuisine in increasingly ambitious directions.
There was never a question of whether New York would embrace Korean cuisine—only what its chefs would dare to do next.
