Finding Home and Comfort in the Food of Korean American Chef Eunjo Park

Eunjo Park, the executive chef at Momofuku’s Kawi, is cooking her way through it. Her food is a reminder that it’s okay not to be one-hundred percent anything.

Momofuku Kawi sits on the fifth floor of Hudson Yards, a monstrous development in Manhattan that took six billion dollars from the city, despite being funded by billionaires and conglomerates. To get to Kawi, you have to traverse the whole goddamn mall. It’s like a pilgrimage—you must cross this soulless landscape until that final escalator, where you’re greeted by the signage: the Momofuku peach, KAWI in bold letters.

The Momofuku Group is now fifteen years old. Kawi is its twelfth restaurant, open since March 2019. I am in my early thirties and Korean American. As someone who has never felt like I belonged anywhere, I find restaurants like Momofuku’s, like Kawi, safe and familiar. Their food feels like home.

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The first time I go to Kawi, it’s June 2019, and they’ve only been open for three months. Kawi’s already been reviewed in the New York Times and Eater—both favorable reviews, I’ve gathered, but I haven’t read either. I haven’t read anything at all about Kawi or about the executive chef, Eunjo Park, avoiding even Yelp and friends who’ve gone. I don’t want any external interference in my head when I go.

That first time, I go for lunch, and I order the rice cake with chili jam and the mackerel lunch set because godeunguh is a fish I grew up eating, whose English name I didn’t learn until I was well into my twenties. It arrives on a wooden tray—a piece of grilled mackerel sits next to a little pile of seared shishito peppers, a bowl of soup I annoyingly can’t identify, a bowl of rice, and a hot, crispy bird’s nest with a sweet sauce for dredging the deep-fried vegetable pieces in.

The food is all delicious, but I fixate on the mackerel because the oily smell that most people find repugnant has been mostly removed, and I want to know what kind of wizardry this is. The rich meatiness of mackerel I crave is all there, though, and the fish is hot and tender, salted just right.

The second time I go to Kawi, it’s for dinner the same day. I get two entrees for myself, starting with the hwedupbahp and following that with the stinky soybean stew, aka dwenjang-jjigae. The stew comes in a little Dutch oven, and, when the server removes the lid, I impatiently wait for him to finish explaining the dish before I promptly stick my face in the steam and inhale.

It smells like the jjigae I grew up eating—earthy, soybean-y, funky—but this jjigae is not the same, more nuanced, the aggressiveness of dwenjang softened without being minimized. The stew is full of chunks of pork belly, potatoes, and radish. There is no tofu, no mushrooms. There is no preponderance of saltiness that’ll put me to sleep in an hour. Just flavor, lots of flavor.

These dishes feel like home to me, though I struggle sometimes to describe what kind of food this is. It’s not traditionally Korean, but it is very Korean at heart. It’s not “fusion,” not a simple mashing together of flavors and textures. Nor is it amorphously “Korean-inspired” because it’s a very specific, intentional thing, something more intrinsically transformative with its own defined identity.

This is the food of a Korean American chef named Eunjo Park, taking the food she grew up with, the food she knows, and making something new that’s all hers. This is food that welcomes me.

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I was born in New York and raised in Los Angeles. I grew up in American schools reading the white canon and learning American history, but listening to Korean pop, watching Korean dramas, and eating Korean food—bouncing between two languages and two cultures. While I appreciate this ability to straddle two worlds now, for much of my life, I struggled, never fitting in.

Too Korean for Korean Americans who clung to their Americanness, fangirled over the Backstreet Boys, and called their friends’ parents by their first names, but too American for Korean Koreans who were up-to-date on contemporary Korean slang, visited Seoul regularly, and preserved their pale skin, I have often felt invisible and unwanted, believing myself to be a lone, strange hybrid thing.

“I’m trying to find my identity,” Eunjo Park, the executive chef at Kawi, said in March 2019. “I always questioned myself as half-grown in Korea, half-grown in America. I’m not Korean, nor am I American. I wasn’t 100% to anyone; I was always in the grey area.”

Park’s in her early thirties and has a CV that includes restaurants like Daniel, Le Bec-Fin, Per Se, as well as Momofuku Ko and Gaon in Seoul. She started her professional career learning to cook French food, thinking of Korean food as humble food. She isn’t the only (or the first) Korean American chef making new connections between her ethnic identity and the European technique she honed in elite kitchens that turn out exquisite, painstakingly plated tasting menus. The more she cooked, she explained, the more she kept going back to Korean cuisine, realizing that she didn’t know that much about it.

In 2016, Park left her job at Momofuku Ko to travel through Australia, Vietnam, and Thailand, before returning to her birth country of South Korea, where she had lived until she was twelve. There, she learned that Korean food is actually “very elegant cuisine,” she said, food that “takes so much more prep time to create something that’s so simple to the guest, something that can be eaten so fast. A lot of love goes into every dish.”

This is food that welcomes me.

It’s not uncommon to hear Asian Americans talk about estrangement from Asian cuisines. Many of us grew up being mocked for our food, for how it looked and smelled. For instance, mackerel is an oily fish that stinks when cooked, a stink that lingers in the air and offends. My parents cook it outside on a camping stove and rush it into the house, sliding the fish off the pan onto a plate while it’s still spitting oil. Kimchi may be trendy now, with bastardized variations sold at markets in hip neighborhoods, but it is still an acquired taste with a smell that permeates.

My detachment from Korean food, however, is rooted in the judgment of other Koreans. I grew up in a predominantly Asian community—I went to a Korean church; most of my classes were majority Asian; and I lived thirty minutes from LA’s Koreatown. In high school, though, I started being body shamed by the Koreans around me because my body didn’t conform to Korean standards. Specifically, I wasn’t skinny.

My own community made me acutely aware of this, shamed for a body that was deemed too big—from family and family friends, all the way to random ajummas in Korean restaurants who would openly give me the up-and-down assessment and offer me dieting advice. In 2012, I cut a trip to Korea short by a week; I couldn’t take the open judgments of my body wherever I went in Seoul, from trendy cafes, to Coex, to grungy hole-in-the-walls.

My self-consciousness and consequent self-loathing led me to avoid Korean food spaces, so I could stop feeling looked at. The problem was that I couldn’t flee into the American side of me—I was (and remain) too Korean for that. My palate and tastes are indubitably Korean.

I habitually returned to the food spaces I grew up with, to the chopsticks crossing dinner tables as everyone reached for the same banchan, the noise of mothers scolding you even as they deboned fish and placed the meat on your rice, the pungent smells of dwenjang and kimchi and ojingeo all rising from steaming dishes that created a cloud over everyone’s heads.

I would return over and over again, only to scurry away when the meal was over. These dinner tables were mine, but I didn’t belong there. I didn’t really belong anywhere.

Until Kawi.

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I go to Kawi seven times in ten weeks.

I hate myself every time I step into Hudson Yards, but I keep coming back because I want to eat more of Park’s food. I talk about it non-stop. I bring friends. I eat as much of the menu as I can, marveling over how she uses rice cakes like pasta (served one way in a ragu that is reminiscent of bulgogi), keeps the structures of kimbap but changes it internally (her tuna kimbap is made with thick cuts of yellowfin tuna and served with this delightfully spicy sauce), and makes her own tofu in-house (it’s brûléed then served with caramelized soy sauce and roe, which brings both texture and a sweet brininess to round out the dish).

I love, too, how she respects the traditional and lets it be—her kimchi isn’t sweetened to suit a Western palate, but is pungent and served perfectly ripened. Her biji-jjigae is full of kimchi and unapologetically spicy. Her gaejang is made of gochujang and ginger; the one concession she makes is to make it easier to eat, the meat already removed from most of the raw marinated crabs. Park knows Korean food. She understands and respects it, but, most importantly, she trusts herself to do the bold thing of embracing the Korean instead of running from it.

According to Park, the menu at Kawi only really started to come together when she started cooking the things that comforted her, shedding any ideas of what she thought she should be doing and going for what was purely authentic to her. Specifically, she made the dish that became Yesterday’s Stinky Soybean Stew. It’s a traditional dish, one that can be off-putting to people unfamiliar with Korean food. To Park, it’s pure comfort, what she asks her mother to make whenever she goes home.

The surprising thing about Kawi, Park once said, is that “it’s becoming more of a Korean restaurant than I ever expected. First, I wanted to do something more of my previous experience of non-Korean food, and then bring it to Kawi, but now it’s more about Korean American food like myself.”

Park trusts herself to do the bold thing of embracing the Korean instead of running from it.

The seventh time I go to Kawi, it’s a miserable Sunday in August. The air is thick with humidity, a storm looming, and I try to talk myself out of trekking out to Hudson Yards. The problem is that I went for lunch with a friend the day before; the server told us they’re still serving gaejang—but they don’t have it every day, and, when they do, it’s only at dinner with only so many available. She said I should probably call before I come in.

Earlier in the summer, Park had served the soy sauce-marinated version (ganjang-gaejang), but I hadn’t eaten it because, the truth is, I have never actually liked gaejang. Something about the texture, the salty marinade, the difficulty of eating it never appealed to me. I can’t get her gaejang out of my mind, though. Even if I don’t like it, I still think I should try it.

At Kawi, the crabs are fresh, marinated just that day. When my bowl arrives, three crab halves sit on one side, opposite a small mound of shredded cabbage and radish, sliced scallions, salmon roe, and an egg yolk. Everything is neatly placed on a mound of perilla-seasoned rice, which has been scooped over the meat already removed from the other crab halves. You’re meant to get your hands dirty when eating gaejang, so I pretend that I know what I’m doing, grab one of the crabs, and bite down, sucking the silky raw meat from the shell.

Raw crabmeat is translucent and has a smooth, pleasant mouthfeel. It doesn’t have that strong a natural flavor of its own. Park’s gochujang-based marinade has a delightful gingery kick to it. I’m glad I came out in the thick humidity and storm, even though I’m still unpleasantly damp and probably smell terrible. I’d written off gaejang as a thing I would never eat, and yet, even after the summer ends, when I go back to Kawi and the server tells me they have the crab, I’ll continue to order it.

And maybe this is the thing that keeps me coming back—that I trust Park. I trust her ability and willingness to tap into her heart and create food that is thoughtful and nuanced, and I am willing to follow her and try whatever she has to offer. Part of it is that her food is incredibly delicious, but, more importantly, hers is food in which I recognize myself.

It’s not that it’s Korean American, but that I can understand the work she had to do to arrive at this point, the struggle she had to go through of trying to figure out who she is, what her food is, what is authentic and true to her. Wherever she is on her journey, she’s cooking her way through it, and her food is a reminder that it’s okay not to be one-hundred percent anything. It’s okay not to belong to existing spaces. We can make spaces of our own.

The exciting part of this is that she’s only getting started. Three months after opening, Park said, “If I want to take Kawi to ten, right now Kawi’s at two. We’re just beginning.”