Inside NYC’s Only 3 Michelin Star Korean Restaurant

[bright music]

Jungsik is a Korean contemporary fine dining

with three Michelin stars.

There's only five restaurants in New York City

that has such accolades.

As a sous chef, there's a lot of pressure,

but it is my job to make sure we send

all the foods at the highest quality and consistency.

Before I joined Jungsik, I used to own

a small takeout restaurant in New Jersey.

I never felt like I was improving.

That's what I love about this job; it just makes you grow

as a person, makes you grow as a chef.

[rhythmic music]

Good morning, guys.

Welcome to Jungsik.

My name is Klay, I'm a sous chef here.

It's 9:00 AM, we have a lot to do;

let's get you guys inside.

This is our main dining room.

We will do 60 to 80 covers every night.

Let's get you guys inside the kitchen.

This is our service kitchen.

Before service, this is our prep area as well.

But during the service, that table right there is our garmo.

That's where we send our amuse-bouche.

This right here is our rice station and meat station.

And right over there is our fish station.

And this is our pastry area.

I gotta go downstairs and check the allergies.

[funky piano music]

Our management office is right here.

This is where we're gonna print out our papers.

Our restaurant is very heavy fish based,

but there's a lot of people who comes in here

with vegetarian or vegan, or no fish in general.

Some of these dishes, some of these proteins,

it's very expensive, and we wanna make sure

they get their values.

As for substitution, we try to look for something

that's a little bit more similar in texture if possible,

with the flavor, as well,

so it feels like they're not missing out much.

Morning, Steven.

We are at our dashboard here.

We're gonna put this list right here

so our line cooks can see it, so if there's any allergies

that they need to see so they can adjust

to what they have to do for their prep that day.

It's 9:30 right now.

As a sous chef, I do anything from making stocks

to butchering fish, to training new line cooks.

The first thing I gotta do is making

a smoked fish-based stock.

We only have an access to two types of wood chip,

which is apple wood chip that I'm using right now,

and hickory wood chip.

But we are trying to smoke a fish,

so it's better to use a apple wood chip.

Hickory wood chip is for heavy meat like red meat,

like a beef or pork, whereas apple wood chip is

a little bit more subtle, so it works well

with a white meat, like a fish or a chicken.

The ultimate goal is to dry out the wood chip

as much as possible in the back oven,

so when we're actually burning the wood chips,

it burns a lot efficient and it burns a lot easier.

This is a cod.

A white flaky fish tends to give a more clean flavor profile

to it rather than other fish,

but the fish needs to be dried properly.

Think of it as water being an extra layer

that's preventing fish to get smoked properly.

As we dry out more, the smoke can get

inside the fish a lot easier.

[funky piano music]

And I'm just gonna bring this upstairs

so we can start smoking this fish.

These are the ingredients that we're gonna need to finish

up our smoke-based stock.

This stock ultimately comes for our second course,

the striped jack fish.

It's our version of [indistinct] muchim.

It's basically a raw sashimi style in Korean.

[wood chips clattering]

You really wanna see every single piece

of this wood chip to be on fire.

Otherwise, if a fish doesn't get smoked properly.

Two [indistinct] torches.

If you deal with one, it takes way too long.

It's also important not to make this wood chip into ashes,

otherwise it's just creating

a little bit more of bitter flavor to it.

Now that the wood chip is well lit,

we're gonna put the fish on top like this,

and make sure that all this smoke does not escape.

I will usually smoke for around an hour.

Voila, no smoking coming out.

[gentle music]

We're just finished with smoking fish.

It's 10:30 now.

Now, we're gonna be making our octo reduction.

Octo reduction, we turn that into our octo aioli,

which goes on with our octopus dish.

When you're cooking the octopus head,

there's a lot of moisture locked inside,

so we just wanna make sure all those parts gets exposed

to the heat when we're cooking.

This membranes tends to block the juice

that's inside the octo head when it gets exposed to heat,

which later it's gonna bring more fishy flavor to it,

so we just wanna make sure it's clean and nice.

Octopus is one of the most fragile when you're cooking it.

Once the skin of octo gets ripped off,

that's when you lose all the juiciness

and all the tenderness that it has.

That's Tom.

His Korean name is Donggeon.

Has mastered how to cook octopus.

If you look at it, the head's gone.

That's where we used the octo reduction earlier,

but the other half gets cooked in that pot

for over an hour 'til it gets tender and juicier.

The octopus dish, we cook the body part

and the legs part inside our radish, scallion,

and kombu water.

Similar technique to sous vide.

During the service, we coat it with a corn starch.

We fry it very quickly 'til it gets crisp.

Octo reduction becomes into a paste, which we make sauce

with aioli, which compliments our octo dish itself.

I'm just gonna throw away some of these liquids.

If we use all these liquids, it's gonna be too fishy.

We're just gonna put our vegetables.

It contains onions, scallion, and garlic.

And now I'm gonna add octo base.

Octo base is a mixture of spicy flakes, soy sauce,

and this golden liquid called yondu.

It's really a extract of vegetables

and it's almost like MSG, I would say,

but it doesn't contain actual monosodium glutamate.

It really brings a flavor out.

And now, I'm gonna be putting dashi,

which is a mixture of kombu and dried fish.

There's so many small details that goes inside.

You can't finish all this with one person.

This is all of team effort.

And we're just gonna leave this reduce a little bit more

until the flavor profile comes up the way we want.

It's 11:50 right now, so let's go into our smoke base.

[cool jazz music]

A moment of truth to see

if the fish has been smoked properly.

All righty, it's been smoked very well.

You can tell correctly when the fish is

golden brown like this.

Let's get the stock going.

Everything that we've done so far is drying the wood chip

inside of back oven, smoking the fish, waiting

until it gets golden brown and smoked properly.

This was all led to just make this stock right here.

This stock ultimately becomes for our second course,

the striped jack fish.

Shu Magi is fish, we bring it in fresh every day.

We butcher the fish and we roll it into a circular shape

and with that shape we put white kimchi mixed

with sesame leaf and a chopped kombu underneath the fish.

On top of the fish, we'll put the pickled tomatoes

and fried kombu.

And on top of that, we'll put caviar covered

with micro cilantro.

At the end, we sauce it with our striped jack sauce.

Smoke base, we mix with a heavy cream and citrus acid,

therefore, it's creating that striped jack sauce.

And with that striped jack sauce we mix with the chive oil

and then we pour that into our striped jack dish.

The dish itself, it's acidic, it's creamy,

there's a little bit of a burst taste to it.

The uniqueness of a caviar just popping in your mouth,

it's truly a one-of-a-kind dish.

We're gonna cook our vegetable first.

Most of our dish has a stock involved into it.

Really those stocks take many days to accomplish,

even this smoke base.

We had to make a fish stock previously

in order to accomplish this smoke base.

Ultimately, I think that really makes

our restaurant very unique.

I just wanna avoid breaking the fish too much.

As it gets break down more,

it's gonna just bring a more fishy flavor to it.

This is alcohol.

It's a mixture of a white wine and vermouth.

The alcohol, as it evaporates,

it gets rid of those fishiness to it,

and it really concentrates the flavor, as well.

I don't smell any hints of alcohol left anymore.

I'm gonna add our herbs, which is a mixture of thymes

and tarragon to help bring more clean taste to it.

It's been about hour 30 minutes,

but I'm just gonna take both downstairs,

and then I'm gonna start straining.

For smoke base, I'm gonna strain

through a perforated [indistinct] pan

and get rid of a big chunks

of smoked fish that's in there.

Now we're gonna strain again.

It has to be perfectly smooth.

This one's gonna go straight to ice bath.

We don't want hot stock to be inside our walk-in;

it's gonna make our other produce bad.

And now I'm gonna strain octo reduction,

which is the same process, as well.

Just a little bit of squeeze on the octo heads just to get

the last bit of octo juice inside.

We wanna strain one more time.

And after this gets strained,

we're gonna reduce even further more.

By the time it gets finished, the final product,

it should be around two cups.

And really, with the amount that we've started, it's really,

we are getting very that tiny portion out of it,

but that's what makes it so unique and so delicious

because you're putting all this effort to create

such a complicated sauce and yet so simple.

[indistinct] just bring upstairs

and then we're gonna reduce even more.

We have our golden liquid here for octopus.

We're gonna simmer for another few more hours

until it becomes nice paste to it.

All this work is just to make an octo aioli that goes

with our octopus, which is very essential sauce

for our signature dish.

[funky music]

And it's 1:15 right now, and we're gonna go

into making our red kimchi.

This is our Napa cabbage.

We soak in in our salt solution.

When you know it's ready, it's when the cabbage bends

almost like a rubber and it's flexible.

What salt water does is it really breaks

down the cell wall of this cabbage.

It helps the lactic acid bacteria to go inside the cabbage.

That's how the fermentation begins.

This been soaked for two days.

You just wanna squeeze the water out completely.

We squeeze all the cabbage out.

Now, let's go into a red pasting process.

This rice paste right here, it's rice and water cooked down

'til rice breaks down.

The starch is gonna break down to sugar,

and then it's gonna go into red kimchi base,

which is consists of spicy flakes, [indistinct] mu,

which is a reddish scallion, anchovy sauce,

shrimp sauce, salty shrimp.

These were all made yesterday.

You wanna let it sit for a day

so it itself its own starts to ferment.

Kimchi itself is very traditional the way we do here.

The red kimchi goes inside our kimbap.

It's one of our signature menu, as well.

We fry the seaweed that's been dried out with rice paste.

We roll it into a circular cylinder shape,

and then inside, we will put the seasoned truffle rice.

Within that rice, we will add pickled mu,

which is a pickled radish, and we'll also add kimchi

into it, and that way, we're creating something unique.

And just like any other preps that we do,

like making stocks, this kimchi takes many, many days.

Just so we can put this tiny bit of kimchi

inside one of our dish, we just wanna make sure we get

that flavor that no one has tried before.

The longer you store it, it ferments longer,

it brings out more sour flavor, more umami flavor to it.

But usually it takes around a week to two,

so we have to plan out way before to make sure

we have enough kimchi for following months.

I try to make sure everything is very tightly spaced.

This [indistinct], it really drives

in an anaerobic environment.

That's what I'm also doing right now

where I'm just trying to take out any air bubbles

that's inside so this kimchi can ferment properly.

Let me just put this in,

and then we're gonna just leave it outside,

and then we're just gonna wait until it ferments completely.

[funky piano music]

It's 2:30 PM right now.

I'm gonna go over the allergies with our host, Jia.

We have bar, one allergy pineapple raw, cooked not okay.

So for no raw pineapple, not cooked,

it'll be [indistinct] change to cod.

One allergy to raw seafood.

Cooked seafood, caviar, seaweed, all okay.

For no raw seafood, we'll send prawn

instead of striped jack.

Instead of sending yellow kimbap, we'll send [indistinct].

Thank you, Chef. Thank you.

[funky piano music]

It's four o'clock.

This is the last thing I'm gonna do to prepare

for our service.

Service starts at five.

My station is, I work on the pans right here.

As the chef expo fires a dish,

our line cook's gonna start cooking their proteins,

and my job is to plate those proteins as they come.

This is cast iron.

In Korea, we have this traditional dish called [indistinct].

We're gonna have pink rice, and we're gonna,

which is mixed with the kimchi that we were doing earlier.

We're gonna be putting that on here, creating that crispy,

nice rice texture to it.

After service, there may be a little bit of water

after it's been washed.

We wanna just clean that rustic part in the cast iron,

and we just wanna make sure it's coated well with our oil.

Sometimes if it's not coat properly,

the rice gets stuck very hard, and those rice tends to burn.

Ever since we got our three star, it's a lot of pressure.

People throughout the world, they're finding out about us.

And in order to meet the expectation

that the world has provided,

we just wanna make sure we send our food flawless.

Everything plates very way it's supposed to be.

No shortcut.

I just finished polishing the pan.

It's 4:30 right now, and we're starting service soon,

and I have more tasks to do,

so I will have to have you guys leave now.

And I appreciate coming by.

[gentle music]