i had a newsletter on nishi i wanted to send, but i went to atomix last night, and my brain is chewing on something else altogether.
i am not trying to draw comparisons, but i also ate at momofuku ko for the first time last month, and my brain inevitably is juxtaposing the two. both ko and atomix feature expensive, elaborate tasting menus. both are two michelin-starred. that is where the similarities might end. i’m uncomfortable writing this newsletter because i don’t think either is better or worse than the other; they’re just different; and i really can’t stress enough that a lot of this is personal and has entirely to do with my personal experience at each restaurant.
(ko, i know, is not a korean american tasting menu. i do group it with asian american tasting menus, though, because the momofuku group is asian american, and there are asian american influences all over ko.)
ko is $255 and atomix is $205, though, really, they’re priced the same — ko simply builds the cost of service into the price. with the addition of one cocktail and one cup of tea (and a bottle of water at atomix), i pay $300 for each meal. (the topic of money, privilege, and value is one that is going to come up later.) both restaurants have a bar area where guests can dine on a limited a la carte menu, and the main focus of both is a tasting menu presented in its own space at a u-shaped counter. at ko, this counter wraps around an open kitchen. at atomix, it wraps around an open serving station that leads into the kitchen. you’re attended to attentively at both restaurants, and the service is structured and friendly. the difference is that, at ko, the chefs themselves serve the food.
ko is more casual; i immediately feel at ease. i wonder now if part of that isn’t just that i’m familiar with momofuku, with its brand and palate, that i know that momofuku is not a cheap brand but it’s also not a stuffy one. atomix is more upscale, more established in its structure and ritual — there are two seatings for the tasting menu, and all the courses are served at the same time to all the guests. the dining area is smaller and more intimate. if any of this reads like critique, it’s not — ko and atomix deliver very different dining experiences, and i spend the meal examining my personal reactions more deeply than anything else because i know a lot of my reactions are hugely personal. this is never intentional, but i walk into korean american spaces with different wants, meaning i want to feel like i belong, though i often forget how different korean americans can be, that we come from so many different places with different ways of existing in our identities. it’s why i’ve spent so much of my life seeking spaces where i might be at ease but ultimately slinking away, feeling rebuffed. i’ve never been korean enough, never american enough, never really wanted to be fully either but wished, instead, that i could find a space in the in-between.
which is maybe my long way of saying that there’s a thoughtfulness to the ceremony at atomix that i deeply enjoy. each course comes with a card that lays out the different components of each dish and includes a blurb from the chef, junghyun park. the food is all incredibly delicious and intricately crafted; i so admire the obsessive attention to detail, the loving ways park seeks to teach diners about korean cuisine and correct misconceptions. ultimately, though, at atomix, i’m sitting in a dining room of not only white people but white people of a certain class, and maybe this just happens to be the group i’m with on this particular night, but, still, i can’t help but think, even as my brain is exploding with excitement and pleasure with every dish — this food is not made for people like me.
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i spend a fair amount of brain space analyzing my Thing for momofuku. i wonder if it’s a trend thing, a cool thing, but, at the end of the day, i don’t give two shits about trends or about cool, and this is my hard-earned money i’m spending on these meals. to start, i’m not going to throw money away on food that doesn’t taste delicious, and momofuku satisfies that baseline and more. even my family of picky, non-adventurous eaters loved noodle bar and kawi.
it took me a long time to accept the fact that i’d never belong to either of the two cultures i grew up with. i think i wanted to feel more welcome in korean spaces because i knew that i wouldn’t ever be fully comfortable in american spaces, even in korean american spaces. in los angeles, when i was growing up, korean americans tended to demarcate into specific groups — k-town koreans, [valley] azn koreans, fob koreans. of the three, i tended towards fob koreans because they also spoke korean, knew k-pop (this was pre-internet, long before k-pop became a global trend), were familiar with korean culture. that tendency to drift towards koreans stayed with me as i grew older, until i moved to new york city and started realizing that, no, there are so many ways to be korean american, and i started thinking that, hey, maybe i can find my people.
which is really where momofuku comes in.
after reading the MS to dave chang’s forthcoming memoir, i find that my attachment to momofuku makes more sense to me because chang and i approach and think about food in very similar ways. we want to challenge the ways people think about authenticity, about racism, about what is permitted to asian food with the same irreverence and fuck you attitude. there are a few things i really want him to fix in his book because i think there’s so much potential in it to do good things, but, in general, i think this is where a lot of my personal attachment to momofuku originates — in many ways, we already speak the same language.
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tilefish is featured on one of the dishes at atomix, and i wonder what’s with the sudden prevalence of tilefish. tilefish is all over the momofuku group right now, too.
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it is not inherently good or bad that the food at atomix is not made for people like me. i bring that up only because, when you’re creating something, who you’re speaking to changes the nature of the thing you’re creating. it’s the same with food, with music, with literature. viet thanh nguyen has spoken about how his pulitzer prize-winning novel, the sympathizer, is narrated not to a white reader but to a vietnamese one — this was a very conscious, deliberate choice on his end. it’s a subtle shift in writing that might not be explicitly voiced, but it’s still a significant one that shapes the reading experience and how the reader feels.
if there’s one thing i want to change at kawi, it’s the way the servers talk about the food. i’m really done with people (in general) framing korean food in comparison to japanese food (like, no, kimbap is not korean sushi, and, no, perilla is not the same as shiso, and, no, dwenjang is not korean miso), and i want them (at kawi) to start talking more about korean food as korean food, to get more granular about the ways korean food is unique and different. eunjo park is already doing that with her food; they just need to catch up with the words they’re attaching to it.
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the chef’s counter at kawi was set up for a tasting menu. words are so insufficient for me to express how badly i want her to do that tasting menu.