2014 In Review: Korean Food Had A Ridiculously Big Year In America

It's a sparkling November afternoon and Audrina Patridge is standing in a cabbage patch near Goseong, South Korea, a harbor town surrounded by snow-capped mountains and icy ocean waters. Patridge, a bubbly television host best known for playing herself on MTV's The Hills and more-coordinated self on Dancing With The Stars, holds a small knife in her manicured hand and begins to cut at the root of a hulking cruciferous vegetable. Carefully guiding her incision, like a parent the afternoon the training wheels come off, is chef Edward Lee. Lee, a Korean-American chef with Brooklyn roots and a successful restaurant group in Louisville, Kentucky, has been asked to show Patridge — and a small film crew — around South Korea for a 30-minute television show to air on NBC's First Look program, a food-travel show that runs after Saturday Night Live.

The weeklong production, which is sponsored by the Korean Food Foundation — a government organization tasked with furthering Korean food culture abroad — isn't focusing on the common tropes associated with Korean food culture in America, specifically barbecue and Westernized fusion foods like tacos or fried chicken. Instead, America's reality sweetheart is digging up a dozen cabbages that will soon be hauled to an unheated shack and cut, brined and seasoned in the autumnal ritual known as kimjang. You can think of the ritualistic act as making kimchi the very old-fashioned way — where insane quantities of chives, shredded daikon radish, green onions and a broth made from kombu, dried pollock and anchovies are mixed with the pungent sauce of fermented shrimp, fish sauce, salt and a crimson Korean red pepper called gochugaru. The colorful paste is then stuffed between the leaves of dozens of heads of brined Napa cabbage, buried in the ground and unearthed a month later. And it's all captured by the kimchi-spattered NBC cameras. 

Video: Audrina Patridge and chef Edward Lee in South Korea

It was not long ago when Korean food in America was nothing more than a curiosity (at best) and a cliché (at worst). Doing Korean was a fun night out with friends to eat a bunch of grilled meat, maybe get a little loaded on soju and have your Korean pal order from a poorly worded, oddly photographed, overwhelmingly extensive menu of soups, stews and steaming platters. It's certainly not bad, any of that (particularly if it was followed by a trip to the karaoke bar). But something significantly changed with Korean food in 2014.

I've admittedly been following the story closer than most, as I'm currently writing a cookbook on the topic to be published by Clarkson Potter. But through a series of events, restaurant openings, media mentions and witnessing Audrina Patridge geek out over Korean abalone first-hand, it became clear that Korean food had a very big 2014 — making serious strides to "catch up" with better-known Asian cuisines like Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese.

"It will only be a matter of time before kimchi is as common knowledge as salsa," says Beverly Kim, the chef-owner of Chicago's wildly popular Korean-American restaurant, Parachute. Opened with her husband Johnny Clark in May, the former Top Chef contestant attracted major buzz for cooking that married traditional Korean dishes and flavors with contemporary presentation and out-of-the-box creativity. For example, the couple make a classic Korean dumpling (mandu), but instead of traditional pork and chives, they stuff it with caramelized cauliflower and tamarind-pear chutney. The chewy rice cake dish — called ddeukbokki — takes a Roman holiday and is tossed with country ham, pecorino, black pepper and egg.

Kim credits her success to cooking with "robust and soulful flavors" while keeping her price point low and restaurant's casual vibe targeted to a younger audience. The effort has worked, and in November, Parachute was named Restaurant of the Year by Eater Chicago. But Parachute isn't the only Korean restaurant making noise in the Windy City. Edward Kim (no relation) continues to excel at his year-and-a-half-old Wicker Park restaurant Mott Street with cooking that not only executes fusion to the T (kimchi empanadas FTW), but also dives into traditional Korean cooking with a square of housemade napa kimchi, pork butt and rice "lasagna" that is basically the best kimchi bokkeumbap (kimchi fried rice) I've ever had.

Expect long wait times on any given night at the newly opened Manhattan branch of Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong.

"Pete Wells' article on Flushing Korean restaurants is a game-changer as far as Korean food is concerned in NYC," says Hooni Kim, chef-owner of Hanjan and Danji, two landmark Korean-American restaurants that have been reviewed favorably by the  Times , with the latter awarded a Michelin star.

Kim, who grew up in New York City, points out that Manhattan Koreatown has been around for 30 years, generally without the ambition to progress Korean cuisine beyond barbecue. "The format is and has been the same for the past 30 years with 100-plus item menus and the compromising or toning down authentic Korean flavors to better cater to the Americanized palates."

But in Flushing it's a different story, which Wells tackles in his piece. "Restaurant owners are first-generation Koreans who cook for other first-generation Koreans, with flavors more in tune with what Koreans in Korea are eating now," says Kim. "His article makes it easier for everyone now to realize how inferior Manhattan Koreatown food really is and has been for the past 10 years."

This was all, of course, before the recent opening of a branch of Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong in the heart of Manhattan's Koreatown. Now, big disclosure here: I'm writing my book, Koreatown: A Cookbook, with the restaurant's young chef, Deuki Hong. So I'm obviously biased and won't comment on the food. But what I can report is that since the restaurant officially opened its doors in early December 2014, there've been one- to two-hour waits pretty much continually (though hour-long waits at Korean barbecue joints can be common on weekends), which can be attributed to the media's growing interest in Korean cuisine. 

Soon after opening, stories appeared on Grub Street and Eater, including top placement on the Heat Map. From my seat, it appears Baekjeong's success can be credited to a few factors, which as Hooni Kim notes, has been lacking in Manhattan: modern design, focused menu, top-notch service and high-quality ingredients. It seems like simple math, but in world of churn-and-burn Korean barbecue restaurants, nothing is a given.

Whether it be Chicago, Los Angeles or New York — not to mention Atlanta (shout out to Sobban!), Seattle or Oakland — Korean food is most certainly on the rise and expanding beyond the traditional neighborhoods. "I'm seeing an increase in overall quality for restaurants that aren't in Koreatown but might be in the suburbs or outskirts," says Kang on the growth in Los Angeles. "It used to be that the farther you were from Koreatown, the worse the Korean food. That's not necessarily true anymore."

And while Hooni Kim agrees that Korean food is on the rise, he still thinks there's room for considerable growth. "The year 2014 has been tremendous in introducing Korean food to more and more people, but I still don't think it's considered 'mainstream' as Japanese, Chinese or even Vietnamese and Thai," he says. "If you're a 'foodie' in America, you know and have an opinion about Korean food. But we're still a long ways from primetime sitcoms ordering Korean food for delivery instead of Chinese or Indian."