Course I
Roots
It started with appetite.
Course I — Roots
Where It Started
It started with appetite. Long before I knew a single technique, I knew what good food felt like — and I couldn't stop chasing it. That early, uncomplicated love of tasty food is what pulled me into this craft, and it has never let go. If anything, it has deepened. The older I get, the more I realise that food is part of life itself: it feeds the body, but it feeds the mind too. It shapes how you feel, how you think, how you show up. That isn't a slogan for me. It's the reason I cook.
“Food feeds the body — and the mind.”
Korean Roots
Underneath everything sits Korea. It shows in how I think about food before it shows in what I cook. In Korean food culture the meal is something shared: dishes meet in the middle of the table, everyone eats from the same spread, and feeding people is a way of looking after them. Patience, fermentation and balance run through all of it, with a handful of humble ingredients — sesame, garlic, chilli, the deep savoury pull of fermented pastes — doing a great deal of work. That way of seeing food has shaped my instincts more than almost anything I learned formally, and it's part of why I respect every cuisine I cook. Whatever I'm cooking, I do it as traditionally as I can, on its own terms.
Ingredients First
None of that technique means much without what you start with. I care — maybe stubbornly — about working with genuinely good quality products, because so much of a dish's success is decided before any technique is applied. You can execute something flawlessly and still fall short if the product wasn't right to begin with. For me, sourcing well isn't a finishing touch. It's the first real decision I make on any dish, and often the difference between a plate that's good and one that's memorable.
Part of that is time. A tomato, a pepper or a peach that has been allowed to ripen naturally on the plant or the tree, in its own season and its own sun, tastes completely different from one picked early and left to colour up in a crate. The sugars have had time to build, the acidity settles into balance, and the aroma is fully there — you can often smell the difference before you taste it. Produce picked too soon can look perfect and still taste of very little. I'd rather wait for what's properly ripe than build a dish around something that never had the chance to taste of itself.