Sohui Kim making haggis, and Yong Shin in action (pajun or scallion pancake? you tell us!). Yong’s photo by Jingyu Lin.
What's in this email
I won’t bury the lede: The first episode of the Shut Up ‘n Eat podcast is out! In this one, we’re visiting the best Korean restaurant in Brooklyn — Insa, now celebrating its tenth anniversary. I live right nearby, and when it opened, I remember being overjoyed simply that we had good Korean food a few blocks from home. What I didn’t realize then was not just how excellent the place would be but how it would mark a new approach to Korean restaurants: It’s at once traditional — if you need a barbecue or kalbijim fix, this is your spot! — but also very contemporary, and in a very Brooklyn way. The menu leans heavily on seasonal farmers’ market produce (cheese corn made with local supersweets), and the karaoke rooms host teen birthdays and bar/bat mitzvahs as well as the occasional drunken revel. Insa feels like a place for the ages. Nice work, chef-owners Sohui Kim and Yong Shin!
First, you should go listen to the podcast! Here it is on this site, and on Spotify, and on Apple Podcasts. (FYI: The sound quality will improve with each episode.)
But then I wanted to pick up on something Yong says waaaaaay at the very end of the podcast, when we’re talking about restaurant trends we like or don’t like:
There’s always too many trends, but at this moment we’re just going to this, like, flavormaxxing apex of — just, like, too much stuff, and you’re just trying to be as… It’s just, like, very pornographic. And I definitely go leaning back into affordability, comfort. You know, just like chill on, you know, the seasonings. Not everything has to be, like, so mid.
I find this fascinating as a philosophy. So much of cooking, especially high-level restaurant cooking, seems to be about, well, maximizing flavor. We expect chefs to select the most flavorful cuts of meat, the sweetest vegetables, the freshest spices — and then to use all their skills to amp things up even more. You’d never just poach carrots in water, right? You’d first make an intense carrot broth, then poach new carrots in that. What kind of crazy diner, let alone chef, wouldn’t want to flavormaxx?
It’s really tempting right now, too, because in this country we now have access to a bigger and better variety of ingredients than ever before. From farmers’ markets to specialty seafood distributors to high-quality soy sauce makers to Sichuan importers to small-batch spice vendors, every flavor is a click or two away from every cook’s kitchen. (And often pretty affordable, too.) In the face of all these delicious options, why not use black lime, Santa Barbara uni, and Lady Edison jinhua ham in a single dish?
At the same time, these attempts to coax maximum flavor out of dishes can go over the top in ways that just don’t work. Dishes get muddy; they lack focus. Diners spend more time trying to identify tastes than enjoying them — and immediately forget what they were eating as soon as they move on to the next course. (I know that happens to me all the time.) The bounty of flavors listed on a menu can present an illusion of sophistication, under which lies a perhaps naive eagerness producing dishes that are, as Yong says, so mid.
And so the best chefs (and home cooks!) know how to remove flavors and improve clarity. I’m reminded of this great 2001 New Yorker profile of Le Cirque’s chef, Sottha Khunn, who was struggling to perfect a French-Cambodian fish dish: “sea bass steamed over a broth of lemongrass and galangal (a gingerlike root), thickened with butter and enlivened with chopped tomatoes, chives, and basil.” Over the course of the profile, writer Molly O’Neill tracks the dish’s evolution, and Sottha’s frustration, as it never comes together quite how he dreams. Until, that is, he finally nails it:
The dish didn’t look bold; it looked innocent. Sottha hadn’t added the tomatoes. The butter sauce was light, and its lemony hue, combined with the pale minced chives and wild greens, was almost translucent against the white fish fillets, like refracted sunlight. Without the tomatoes, the sauce was tart and sour, the fish gentle and sweet. The scent of lemongrass erupted like a cheer over the distant, poignant memory of galangal and garlic. Sottha had done it: he had found a new balance between East and West.
The room became very quiet. The elders looked at each other as if one of their children had just won the Nobel Prize. Within three minutes, every plate on the table looked as if it had been licked clean. …
Later, when I asked Sottha what had inspired him to leave the tomatoes out of the fish dish, he replied that it had simply been an oversight. But his mother did not agree. “Sottha did not forget the tomatoes,” she said as we cleared the table. “He remembered that he did not need them.”
Trends like flavormaxxing come and go. Talent is eternal.
Chef vs. Robot: Your vote matters
In every podcast interview with a chef, Cathy and I have them play “Chef vs. Robot,” a game where we present them with three random ingredients and they have to invent a restaurant-worthy dish that uses them — and then we ask an AI the same thing. (You can hear it at 37:09 on the podcast.) And then YOU, our beloved readers, get to vote on the winner. Here are the options for Insa — we’ll remind you again next week, and voting closes June 20: