Chef Joseph Lidgerwood prepares to cook beef over a wood fire at Evett restaurant in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 7.
Jun Michael Park for NPR
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Jun Michael Park for NPR
Chef Joseph Lidgerwood prepares to cook beef over a wood fire at Evett restaurant in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 7.
Jun Michael Park for NPR
SEOUL, South Korea — How do you reinterpret a simple traditional dish into food that wins awards and commands a high price at a fine dining restaurant? Here’s an example:
For a final course at Evett, a restaurant in Seoul’s trendy Gangnam district, Australian chef Joseph Lidgerwood grills a chunk of Korean beef over a wood fire.
Then, he distills an inexpensive bowl of white rice and a dollop of brown doenjang — a paste of salty, fermented soybeans — reducing them to a small white puree with brown stripes, to accompany the beef.
Lidgerwood confesses that “the thing that I always wrestle with at fine dining restaurants is that sometimes it never tastes as good as the traditional Korean stuff.”
He says he asks himself, “this tastes amazing, how can we bring this back to Evett? How can we make this into a dish that can be served at a location like this?”
While foreign-run, Evett is part of Seoul’s burgeoning gastronomic scene driven largely by South Korean chefs.
Their success in fine-tuning Korean food helped them scale the heights of haute cuisine, adding the…