Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Korean food is exploding around the world, found in the homes, restaurants, hearts, and stewpots of people from Seoul and Los Angeles to New York City, Shanghai, Portland, Paris, and beyond. Korean food and culture are at the epicenter of innovation, not just in the United States and Korea but around the world. It can feel like the Korean Wave (dubbed Hallyu) touches nearly everybody and anybody consuming food, music, literature, and Netflix melodramas. It’s a story that needed telling, and in a big way.

In this book, we capture the modern excitement around Korean food through stories of chefs and home cooks and the exciting recipes that are shaping the modern Korean kitchen, from centuries-old traditions to next-wave dishes that feel like they were invented overnight. (And we means Deuki and Matt and our photographer buddy, Alex.)

While Korean food knows no borders—we’ve personally cooked in a modern Korean restaurant in Iceland—this is a book that focuses on two primary areas we know best: modern Korea itself and Koreatowns and Koreaninspired kitchens throughout the United States. During our over two years of travels specifically for this book—and a decade of exploration prior—we met hundreds of restaurant owners, farmers, shopkeepers, a few Buddhist monks, a couple of massively popular YouTubers, a professional golfer, and many others who hold Korean food and culture at the center of their lives. Among our visits to Korea were trips in the fall of 2021 and 2022, spending time in a country that was facing many of the global trials of a post-pandemic world and oftentimes emerging with exceedingly fresh ideas and innovation. And back here in the United States, we’ve talked with Korean immigrants, the children of Korean immigrants, Korean adoptees, and others who are simply inspired by all aspects of Korean cuisine and culture.

In this book, we’ve collected the stories and recipes from these Citizens of Koreaworld (we count ourselves and our recipes among them), and through all of these conversations, we’ve seen many different perspectives on what “modern” Korean food is—dishes that reach back, dishes that look forward, dishes that represent a personal point of view, and dishes that seem timeless and universal. These include (and these are only a few) tteokbokki turned rose with cream, fried chicken showered with crispy anchovies and shishito peppers, and giant beef short ribs smoked in hay and then grilled (and a radish kimchi granita to serve with them). We travel to Jeolla-do and taste the best vegan broccoli salad topped with a spicy, salty ssamjang mayo (Vegenaise, of course), and when we get to Jeju Island, we experience a whole fried (and smashed) gochujang-seasoned fish that has changed the way we cook fish at home. Back in the United States, we fry rice with pineapple kimchi and add kimchi to pimento cheese in a chapter tackling the big, bold, sometimes controversial world of fusion cooking. And we cover sweets and snacks—hello, banana milk cake. As some of you may know, Koreans are masters of the snack and bring recipes for popcorn dusted with kimchi salt and an inventive way to soup up that package of Shin Ramyun.

Expanding beyond recipes, we touch on the modern history of Korea and the Korean diaspora through short essays and visits to some places less covered in the Western media. We’re excited to show you our journey around Koreaworld. But how did we get here exactly? Let’s go back a bit. Starting in 2012, we spent over two years traveling to the Koreatowns of the United States (especially in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York) to research our first cookbook, Koreatown, interviewing more than one hundred chefs and business owners.

Once back in our New York City kitchens, we developed recipes that reflected traditional home and restaurant cooking. We made an emphatic call for readers to look beyond grilled meat (widely known as “Korean barbecue”) and fusion cooking like kimchi tacos to embrace the more traditional dishes that have been beloved—and cooked ubiquitously—in Koreatowns for generations. Gamjatang (pork neck and perilla seed stew), yukgaejang (fiery shredded beef soup), and yukhwe (raw rib eye seasoned with sesame oil and orchard fruit and served chilled) received equivalent real estate alongside such well-known favorites as kalbi (marinated short ribs) and twice-fried chicken.

Since its publication in 2016, Koreatown has continued to be read and cooked from (thank you, friends on Instagram, for sharing all those kimchi bokkeumbap photos). But within a few years of finishing it, we started talking about what changes we were seeing in Korean food. Our conversations, between busy jobs while living on opposite coasts, weren’t first focused on writing another book. They were more about our shared observations of how exciting and inspiring the Korean food scene—and Korean culture as a whole—had become, not just in the United States but also in Korea. As we started to talk, we realized that the simultaneous evolution and spread of Korean food and culture was one of the biggest cultural stories in the world, period. We needed to get to work, and the result is this book you hold. Welcome to Koreaworld.

When people find out that we are writing a book about modern Korean food, the reaction is often one of great interest and excitement quickly followed by questions. Here are a few of the most frequently asked ones. They not only cover topics we’ve encountered during our many travels while working on this book but also go back well before that too.

When did Korean food get huge in the United States?

This is an interesting question. It would be wildly inaccurate to say that Korean food didn’t have a clear slot in American food culture when we were writing our first book. Korean immigration is one of America’s success stories. After the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which removed quotas that strongly favored European immigration, the Korean immigrant population in the United States boomed, rising from 11,000 in 1960 to 290,000 in 1980. The Korean-born population grew to 568,000 in 2000 and peaked at 1.1 million immigrants in 2010—slightly ticking down to 1,039,000 in 2019, according to the US Census.

It’s important to contextualize Korean immigration to understand what came next. When we started writing our first book in the summer of 2013, Korean restaurants, like Korean-owned dry cleaners and bodegas, were woven into not just Korean American society but urban culture as a whole, particularly in communities like Los Angeles, New York City, and the outskirts of Atlanta and Washington, DC. But the deep bench of braises, stews, grilled meats, and seasoned vegetables that we have all grown to love were rarely name-checked in established media outlets. Kimchi was known and starting to find its way into non-Korean refrigerators, and thanks in part to Roy Choi’s culinary and social media skills, Mexican and Korean cuisines had merged at the launch of the popular Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck in November 2008. But both fundamental and trending Korean cooking concepts like banchan (the meal’s introductory small plates), jorim (seasoned and simmered foods), kimjang (kimchi-making season), plant-based temple cuisine, dalgona coffee, and ssam (outside of Momofuku’s famed slow-roasted whole pork shoulder Bo Ssäm, which in the end wasn’t actually ssam) were hardly part of mainstream conversations.