For most of the time Koreatown has existed, the answer to where should we eat was a grill. You sat at a table with a vent hood dropping over it, ordered meat by the cut, and cooked it yourself while the banchan accumulated around the edges — the small seasoned side dishes that arrive unbidden and in quantity alongside any Korean meal, and are refilled without your asking. It is a wonderful way to spend an evening, and it is why most people ask us about this neighborhood at all. But something else has happened over the past fifteen years, largely out of view, and it is worth describing precisely rather than in superlatives. No American city beats Los Angeles for traditional Korean cooking; that is settled, and any Angeleno will settle it for you again if given the chance. What New York has instead is the more restless thing. Outside South Korea, this is the best place in the world to eat Korean food that has been taken apart and rebuilt — classic flavors put through technique and imagination and returned as something else. Pete Wells drew that distinction in the Times in 2023, and it has only sharpened since. The story runs in two directions from the same street.
The Grill
Korean barbecue is a social technology as much as a cuisine. The grill sits in the middle, the cooking is communal and unhurried, and the meal has no single course to wait for — it accretes. Transplanting it to Manhattan meant solving a ventilation problem in buildings never designed for open fire on the second floor, which is why the extraction hood over each table became the signature object of the format here.
It is worth saying plainly that the grill is not the lesser option. A long table at a good barbecue house, ordering in rounds, is one of the most enjoyable meals in the city, and it is the version of Korean dining that most rewards a group. What it is not is the whole picture.
The Argument from the Steakhouse
In June 2017, Simon Kim opened COTE at 16 West Twenty-Second Street, a few blocks south of Koreatown, having closed a Michelin-starred restaurant of his own to do it. Born in Seoul, raised on Long Island from the age of thirteen, and trained front-of-house under Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Thomas Keller, he had a specific argument to make: that Korean barbecue and the American steakhouse were the same idea, and that neither of them needed to be solemn to be serious.
COTE put dry-aged prime beef and American Wagyu on a tabletop grill, kept the banchan and the kimchi stew, and let diners cook their own dinner mid-conversation. Michelin awarded it a star on the thirtieth of October, less than five months after it opened — the first Korean steakhouse in New York and, still, the only Michelin-starred Korean tabletop grill in the world. It has held the star every year since.
What matters about COTE is not the accolade but the proposition it settled. The grill was not a casual format that fine dining would eventually outgrow. It could be the fine dining.
The Other Direction
The second route ran through the tasting menu. Hooni Kim opened Danji on West Fifty-Second Street at the end of 2010 and took a Michelin star the following year — the first Korean chef-restaurateur in America to do so, and the proof that the guide would look at this cooking at all.
Jungsik Yim opened Jungsik in TriBeCa in 2011. It had a star within a year and two by 2013, where it stayed for more than a decade, plating Korean flavors with the precision of a grand French room. Bibimbap — ordinarily a homely bowl of rice, vegetables and egg stirred together at the table — was rebuilt with crisped quinoa, wagyu tartare and gochujang, the fermented red chili paste that underpins half of Korean cooking. Branzino arrived with white kimchi and nothing much else.
The Jungsik Line
Here is the part that makes this a story rather than a list. Jungsik became a school.
Junghyun Park — known universally as JP — came to it sideways: a food science degree, then apprenticeships in Finland, at The Ledbury in London, and in Australia, to make up for having no classical training. He cooked at Jungsik in Seoul, then moved to New York to run the TriBeCa kitchen as chef de cuisine, and led it to its second star. In 2016 he and his wife Ellia opened Atoboy, a deliberately approachable room built around banchan, as a way of introducing the city to what they meant to do. Two years later, on the thirtieth of May 2018, they opened Atomix at 104 East Thirtieth Street — fourteen seats at a counter, each course arriving with a card explaining it. It holds two Michelin stars, and in 2024 it placed sixth on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, the highest of any restaurant in the United States.
Hoyoung Kim left the same kitchen to open Jua, and later Moono, a looser family-style room in a landmarked three-story building. Eunji Lee went from Jungsik’s pastry section to open Lyée. One kitchen, three chefs, and a substantial share of the city’s modern Korean cooking traceable to it.
Three Stars, and a Sixteenth Floor
In December 2024 Michelin promoted Jungsik to three stars — the first Korean restaurant in the United States to hold them, at a moment when no restaurant in Korea itself did. There are only around a dozen three-star rooms in the country.
The following guide brought the news that matters most if you are staying here. When Pete Wells surveyed this new wave in 2023, he noted that not one of its restaurants stood on the Koreatown strip itself; they were scattered from Midtown to TriBeCa, and the block remained what it had always been. That is no longer true. Joo Ok, which began in Seoul in 2016, was promoted to two stars — and Joo Ok is on the sixteenth floor of 22 West Thirty-Second Street. Chef Shin Chang-ho’s tasting menu is served directly above Korea Way, with the skyline through the windows and the neon of the block sixteen floors below. One of the finest Korean meals in the world is upstairs from the barbecue houses.
A few doors west, Nōksu holds a star in a former barbershop in the basement of the Herald Square subway entrance, behind an unmarked door at the foot of a staircase. Fifteen seats.
How to Use All of This
The practical shape of the neighborhood, if you are deciding tonight:
For a group, or for anyone who wants dinner to last three hours and involve everyone, the grill. For a proposition — an anniversary, a first night in the city, someone who wants to understand what the fuss is about — the steakhouse argument at COTE, which is fifteen minutes from our door. For a tasting menu, Atomix is six blocks north of the hotel, and Joo Ok is the answer if you want the neighborhood and the cooking in the same evening.
All of these require booking, most of them well in advance, and several of them are the kind of reservation that is easier for us to obtain than for you to obtain alone. That is precisely what the desk is here for. Ask early.
And if you arrived assuming Korean food means one kind of meal, here is the plain fact: in the space of a single generation this cooking went from a neighborhood grill to three Michelin stars, and both ends of that range are within twenty minutes of this lobby.
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