Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with Chef Klay Kim, sous chef at Jungsik—a trailblazing Korean fine dining restaurant in New York City with three Michelin stars, a distinction shared by only five restaurants in NYC.
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00:01Jungshik is a Korean contemporary fine dining
00:03with three Michelin stars.
00:06There's only five restaurants in New York City
00:08that has such accolades.
00:10As a sous chef, there's a lot of pressure,
00:12but it is my job to make sure we stand
00:15all the foods at the highest quality and consistency.
00:19Before I joined Jungshik,
00:20I used to own a small takeout restaurant in New Jersey.
00:24I never felt like I was improving.
00:27That's what I love about this job.
00:29It just makes you grow as a person,
00:31makes you grow as a chef.
00:36Good morning, guys.
00:37Welcome to Jungshik.
00:38My name is Clay.
00:39I'm a sous chef here.
00:40It's 9 a.m.
00:40We have a lot to do.
00:41Let's get you guys inside.
00:44This is our main dining room.
00:45We will do 60 to 80 covers every night.
00:48Let's get you guys inside the kitchen.
00:50This is our service kitchen.
00:52Before service, this is our prep area as well.
00:55But during the service,
00:56that table right there is our garmo.
00:58That's where we send out our amuse bush.
01:00This right here is our rice station and meat station.
01:04And right over there is our fish station.
01:06And this is our pastry area.
01:08I got to go downstairs and check the allergies.
01:13Our management office is right here.
01:15This is where we're going to print out our papers.
01:17Our restaurant is very heavy fish-based,
01:20but there's a lot of people who comes in here with vegetarian or vegan or no fish in general.
01:27Some of these dishes, some of these proteins, it's very expensive.
01:31And we want to make sure they get their values.
01:34As for substitution, we try to look for something that's a little bit more similar in texture,
01:38if possible with the flavor as well.
01:41So it feels like they're not missing out much.
01:45Morning, Steven.
01:46We are at our dashboard here.
01:48We're going to put this list right here so our line cooks can see it.
01:52So if there's any allergies that they need to see,
01:54so they can adjust to what they have to do for their prep that day.
02:00It's 9.30 right now.
02:02As a sous chef, I do anything from making stocks to butchering fish to training new line cooks.
02:09The first thing I got to do is making a smoked fish-based stock.
02:13We only have access to two types of wood chips,
02:16which is apple wood chips that I'm using right now and hickory wood chips.
02:20But we're trying to smoke a fish, so it's better to use an apple wood chip.
02:25Hickory wood chip is for heavy meat, like red meat, like beef or pork,
02:29whereas apple wood chip is a little bit more subtle.
02:33So it works well with like a white meat, like a fish or chicken.
02:36The ultimate goal is to dry out the wood chip as much as possible in the back oven.
02:41So when we're actually burning the wood chips,
02:43it burns a lot efficiently and it burns a lot easier.
02:48This is a cod.
02:49White flaky fish tends to give a more clean flavor profile to it rather than other fish.
02:54The fish needs to be dried properly.
02:58Think of it as like water being an extra layer that's preventing fish to get smoked properly.
03:04As we dry out more, the smoke can get inside the fish a lot easier.
03:12And I'm just going to bring this upstairs so we can start smoking this fish.
03:17These are the ingredients that we're going to need to finish up our smoke-based stock.
03:21This stock ultimately becomes for our second course, the striped jack dish.
03:25It's our version of Hue Muchim.
03:27It's basically raw sashimi style in Korean.
03:34You really want to see every single piece of this wood chip to be on fire.
03:38Otherwise, if the fish doesn't get smoked properly.
03:41Two bullet torches.
03:42If you deal with one, it takes way too long.
03:45It's also important not to make these wood chips into ashes.
03:48Otherwise, it's just creating a little bit more of a bitter flavor to it.
03:52Now that the wood chip is well lit, we're going to put the fish on top like this.
04:00And make sure all this smoke does not escape.
04:03I will usually smoke for around an hour.
04:07Wa la la.
04:07No smoking coming out.
04:09We're just finished with the smoking fish.
04:14It's 10.30 now.
04:15Now we're going to be making an octo reduction.
04:18Octo reduction, we turned it into our octo aioli, which goes on with our octopus dish.
04:25When you're cooking the octopus head, there's a lot of moisture locked inside.
04:29So we just want to make sure all those parts get exposed to the heat when we're cooking.
04:35This membranes tends to block the juice that's inside the octo head when it gets exposed to heat,
04:43which later it's going to bring more fishy flavor to it.
04:47So we just want to make sure it's clean and nice.
04:51Octopus is like one of the most fragile when you're cooking it.
04:55Once the skin of octo gets ripped off,
04:58that's when you lose all the juiciness and all the tenderness that it has.
05:02That's Tom.
05:03His Korean name is Donggun.
05:05His mastered how to cook octopus.
05:08If you look at it, the head's gone.
05:10That's where we used the octo reduction earlier.
05:12The other half gets cooked in that pot for over an hour until it gets tender and juicier.
05:18The octopus dish, we cook the body part and the legs part inside our radish,
05:25scallion, and kombu water.
05:27Similar technique to sous vide.
05:29During the service, we coat it with the cornstarch.
05:31We fry it very quickly until it gets crisp.
05:35Octo reduction becomes into a paste, which we make sauce with aioli,
05:40which complements our octo dish itself.
05:44I'm just going to throw away some of these liquids.
05:46If we use all these liquids, it's going to be too fishy.
05:49We're just going to put our vegetables.
05:51It contains onion, scallion, and garlic.
05:54And now I'm going to add octobase.
05:58Octobase is a mixture of spicy flakes, soy sauce, and this golden liquid called yondu.
06:05It's really like an extract of vegetables.
06:08And it's almost like MSG, I would say, but it doesn't contain actual monosodium glycide.
06:13It really brings the flavor out.
06:15Now I'm going to be putting dashi, which is a mixture of kombu and dried fish.
06:20There's so many small details that goes inside.
06:23You can't finish all this with one person.
06:26This is all of team effort.
06:27And we're just going to leave this, reduce a little bit more until the flavor profile comes up
06:32the way we want.
06:33It's 11.15 right now, so let's go into our smoke base.
06:42A moment of truth to see if the fish has been smoked properly.
06:49Alrighty, it's been smoked very well.
06:53You can tell correctly when the fish is golden brown like this.
06:58Let's get the stock going.
06:59Everything that we've done so far is drying the wood chip inside the deck oven,
07:03smoking the fish, waiting until it gets golden brown and smoked properly.
07:07This was all led to just make this stock right here.
07:10This stock ultimately becomes for our second course, the striped jack dish.
07:15Chimaji is fish.
07:16We bring it in fresh every day.
07:19We butcher the fish and we roll it into a circular shape.
07:23And with that shape, we put white kimchi mixed with sesame leaves and a chopped kombu underneath
07:29the fish.
07:30On top of the fish, we'll put the pickled tomatoes and fried kombu.
07:34And on top of that, we'll put caviar covered with micro cilantro.
07:39At the end, we sauce it with our striped jack sauce.
07:43Smoke base, we mix with the heavy cream and citrus acid.
07:47Therefore, it's creating the striped jack sauce.
07:49And with that striped jack sauce, we mix with the chive oil.
07:53And then we pour that into our striped jack dish.
07:56The dish itself is acidic.
07:58It's creamy.
07:59There's a little bit of a burst taste to it.
08:02The uniqueness of a caviar just popping in your mouth.
08:04It's truly a one-of-a-kind dish.
08:06We're gonna cook our vegetable first.
08:08Most of our dish has stock involved into it.
08:11Really, those stocks take many days to accomplish.
08:15Even this smoke base, we had to make a fish stock previously in order to accomplish this smoke base.
08:22Ultimately, I think that really makes our restaurant very unique.
08:25I just want to avoid breaking the fish too much.
08:30As it gets break down more, it's gonna just bring a more fishy flavor to it.
08:34This is alcohol.
08:35It's a mixture of white wine and vermouth.
08:37The alcohol, as it evaporates, it gets rid of those fishiness to it.
08:41And it really concentrates the flavor as well.
08:45I don't smell any hints of alcohol left anymore.
08:48I'm gonna add our herbs, which is a mixture of thyme and tarragon
08:52to help bring more clean taste to it.
08:58It's been about an hour, 30 minutes.
09:00I'm just gonna take both downstairs and then I'm gonna start straining.
09:03For smoke base, I'm gonna strain through a porphyrated potato pan
09:07and get rid of like a big chunks like smoked fish that's in there.
09:10Now we're gonna strain again.
09:12It has to be perfectly smooth.
09:16This one's gonna go straight to ice bath.
09:18We don't want hot stock to be inside our walk-in.
09:23It's gonna make our other produce bad.
09:25And now I'm gonna strain octo reduction,
09:29which is the same process as well.
09:31Just a little bit of squeeze on the octo heads,
09:33just to get that last bit of octo juice inside.
09:36We're gonna strain one more time.
09:39And after this gets strained, we're gonna reduce even further more.
09:43By the time it gets finished, the final product,
09:47it should be around two cups.
09:48And really, with the amount that we've started,
09:51it's really we're getting very that tiny portion out of it.
09:53But that's what makes it so unique and so delicious.
09:58Because you're putting all this effort to create such a complicated sauce,
10:03and yet so simple.
10:04We're gonna just bring upstairs and then we're gonna reduce even more.
10:07We have our golden liquid here for octopus.
10:09We're gonna simmer for another few more hours until it becomes nice paste to it.
10:15All this work is just to make an octo aioli that goes with our octopus,
10:21which is very essential sauce for our signature dish.
10:28It's 1.15 right now and now we're gonna go into making our red kimchi.
10:33This is our napa cabbage.
10:35We soak it in our salt solution.
10:38When you kind of know it's ready, it's like when the cabbage
10:41bends almost like a rubber and it's flexible.
10:45What salt water kind of does is it really breaks down the cell wall of this cabbage.
10:51It helps the lactic acid bacteria to go inside the cabbage.
10:55That's how the fermentation begins.
10:58This been soaked for two days.
11:00You just want to squeeze the water out completely.
11:03We've squeezed all the cabbage out.
11:05Now let's go into a red pasting process.
11:08This rice paste right here, it's rice and water cooked down till rice breaks down.
11:14The starch is gonna break down to sugar and then it's gonna go into red kimchi base,
11:18which consists of spicy flakes, moo, which is a radish,
11:22scallion, anchovy sauce, shrimp sauce, salty shrimp.
11:25These were all made yesterday.
11:27You kind of want to let it sit for a day.
11:30So it itself, its own, starts to ferment.
11:33Kimchi itself is very traditional, the way we do here.
11:36The red kimchi goes inside our kimbap.
11:40It's one of our signature menu as well.
11:42We fry the seaweed that's been dried out with rice paste.
11:46We roll it into a circular cylinder shape.
11:49And then inside, we will put the seasoned truffle rice.
11:53Within that rice, we will add pickled moo, which is a pickled radish.
11:58And we will also add kimchi into it.
12:00And that way, we're creating something unique.
12:03And just like any other preps that we do, like making stocks,
12:06this kimchi takes many, many days.
12:09Just so we can put this tiny bit of kimchi inside one of our dish,
12:13we just want to make sure we get that flavor that no one has tried before.
12:17The longer you store it, it ferments longer.
12:21It brings out more sour flavor, more umami flavor to it.
12:25Usually it takes around a week to two.
12:28So we have to plan out way before to make sure we have enough kimchi for the following months.
12:34I try to make sure everything is very tightly spaced.
12:37These bacterias, they really thrives in an anaerobic environment.
12:42That's what I'm also doing right now.
12:44I'm just trying to take out any air bubbles that's inside.
12:47So this kimchi can ferment properly.
12:50We just put this in and then we're going to just leave it outside.
12:53And then we're just going to wait until it ferments completely.
12:58It's 2.30 p.m. right now.
13:00I'm going to go over the dishes with our host, Jia.
13:03We have bar, one allergy to pineapple, raw, cooked, not okay.
13:07So for no raw pineapple, not cooked, it'll be a calvi change to cod.
13:14One allergy to raw seafood, cooked seafood, caviar, seaweed, all okay.
13:19For no raw seafood, we'll send prawn instead of stripe jack.
13:23Instead of sending yellow kimbap, we'll send frugokki kimbap.
13:27Thank you, chef.
13:28It's four o'clock.
13:33This is the last thing I'm going to do to prepare for service.
13:37Service starts at five.
13:39My station is, I work on the pass right here.
13:42As the chef expo fires a dish, our line cooks going to start cooking their proteins.
13:47And my job is to plate those proteins as they come.
13:51This is cast iron.
13:53In Korea, we have this traditional dish called nurungji.
13:56We're going to have ink rice, which is mixed with the kimchi that we were doing earlier.
14:02We're going to be putting that on here, creating that crispy, nice rice texture to it.
14:07After service, there may be a little bit of water after it's being washed.
14:11We want to just clean that rustic part in the cast iron.
14:15And we just want to make sure it's coated well with our oil.
14:19Sometimes if it's not coated properly, the rice gets stuck very hard and those rice tends to burn.
14:26Ever since we got our three-star, it's a lot of pressure.
14:30People throughout the world, they're finding out about us.
14:35And in order to meet the expectation that the world has provided, we just want to make sure
14:42we send out food flawless.
14:44Everything plates in the way it's supposed to be, no shortcut.
14:50I just finished polishing the pan.
14:52It's 4.30 right now.
14:54We're starting service soon and I have more tasks to do.
14:58So I will have to have you guys leave now.
15:01And I appreciate it coming by.