A Winding PathPhotos & Text by Mina Park1. Bibimbap Bar & Dinner Parties
My cooking career started because I always loved to host dinner parties for my friends and family. I remember cooking for friends when I was in elementary school and high school and cooking Thanksgiving feasts in my college dorm room. My late mother always cooked and hosted these delicious, lively dinner parties; without me even realizing, she was teaching me how to be the consummate hostess.
This photograph is from one of the parties I threw in Hong Kong a very long time ago: a baby shower for a dear friend who loves Korean food. It was a DIY party, where we had a bibimbap bar and an ice cream sundae bar for people to construct their own dream bowls—such an easy, yet fun way to share food with your friends. It was because of my dinner parties that some of my friends who work in the food and beverage industry encouraged me to start doing pop-ups in Hong Kong. Cooking for my family and friends will always bring me the purest joy, but after my first public event and seeing even strangers enjoy my food, I was inspired to continue cooking publicly and launched Sook, a platform for my food-related projects. 2. Pop-up in London:
I have been fortunate to collaborate with wonderful chefs and restaurants all over the world. It was eye-opening to see how different chefs and restaurant kitchens worked, and I loved working on menus that highlighted Korean ingredients and flavours. Pop-ups can be hectic depending on the scale, and I had to learn how to be very agile and flexible with my vision for an event. In June 2017, I collaborated with a florist friend and a female cocktail master in London for a botanical fantasy pop-up. My friends enlisted the help of extremely talented chefs who had assisted Dan Barber on his London pop-up. Though we met the day we started cooking, we clicked right away, and it was such a fun weekend.
The meal included banchan, of course, including a trio of pickles made with finds from a London farmers’ market. I always include pickles in my meals because they provide a refreshing balance against heavier dishes. 3. A Dish from My Temple Cooking Studies:
When I finally quit my legal job, one of the first things I did was go to Korea to learn from Buddhist temple food masters. Growing up, whenever we visited Seoul, my mother always took me to restaurants that served Korean temple food since I was a vegetarian for quite some time. I thought the cuisine was so soulful and elegant. It was impossible to learn about temple food outside of Korea, at least at the time. My stay at Jeong Kwan seunim’s temple in Jeollanam-do really deepened my connection to cooking and irrevocably altered my direction when it came to cooking.
It also changed my life because I met my husband, Kwang, at her temple. I did a series of events in Hong Kong and even Lisbon, sharing my appreciation for Korean temple food. I always took care to say that I was sharing it as someone who is also learning about it. This photo shows my attempt at creating a meal using the principles and mindset I learned from temple food masters. It includes a lotus-wrapped sweet rice parcel and japchae made with sun-dried dotori-muk (acorn jelly), one of my favourite comfort foods. 4. Hotteok for My Son:
With two chefs as parents, our son doesn’t have much choice but to love to eat. When he particularly enjoys eating something, he hums in appreciation. Watching him enjoy something we have cooked for him brings true joy. These days, we try to pack every meal and snack with vegetables. This hotteok is a twist on the Korean street snack, which is usually filled with nuts and honey. Instead, we like to make savoury versions stuffed with greens. This particular one has shrimp, zucchini, and spinach, and is fragrant with perilla oil; the batter is made with a touch of corn flour, which helps make the dough fluffy. A hand pie of any kind is one of our son’s favourite foods, probably because it’s so easy to eat. You can make these hotteok small so that it’s even easier for toddlers to hold with their hands.
5. Maesaengi Pancakes:
Now that I have moved on from pop-ups to running actual restaurants with my husband, I've been immersed in a completely different world. For us, it’s important to share the complexity of Korean food traditions. I also love sharing the beauty of Korean ceramics masters. My mother was an artist. She believed that the presentation of a meal—from the tableware to the plating of the dishes and the arrangements on the table—was almost as important as the food itself. I like to plate my food in a homey, inviting way, with little fuss. The ceramics I use are handmade and earthy, so you can sense the hands of the potter in the pieces. My goal is to create a feeling of warmth and rooting in the ancestral earth through the visual.
This dish is maesaengi pancakes with oysters. Maesaengi is a delicate, feathery seaweed that is difficult to find outside of Korea. You might be able to find it frozen, like we can in Los Angeles. We made a different version of maesaengi pancakes for our restaurant. It feels like part of our purpose is to share our love for Korean ingredients that people who come to our restaurant may not have had before. Mina Park is a cook, restaurant owner, teacher, and former lawyer. She is the co-chef and co-owner of Shiku restaurant, mom-and-pop shop serving homestyle Korean food in Los Angeles. | IG: @sookbyminapark
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