Cooking from Korea to France and the Mediterranean with Sung Park

You have a family history in restaurants, right?

Yeah, I’m from Seoul, capital city of South Korea. I lived half of my life there, then half of my life in Europe and Hong Kong and the United States. My grandma, she passed away in New York actually six years ago, but she started kind of a cafe during the Korean War back in the 1950s for GIs. It didn’t have any building. It was kind of a tent. She was selling coffee. 

Later, the family opened a Korean barbecue restaurant in Seoul when I was little up to when I was a teenager. And then we opened the first Korean restaurant in Hong Kong history—my biological mom, she opened it back in the 1980s. 

I wasn’t in the restaurant industry myself until my late twenties because I hated it! You grow up in your family business, you can end up hating it. I was originally in the fashion industry. 

What were you doing in fashion?

I was a fashion buyer in the 1990s. I was traveling seven or eight months a year—Milan, Paris, New York. When I was in Europe, I tasted many, many different kinds of European food. I moved back to New York in late 1997, and I wanted to be a chef. But I didn’t have any experience. 

I started as a dishwasher, and my chef told me to go to culinary school, so I did that at the Art Institute in New York. But even though I had just started cooking, my resume was already too long. So I would just put the most recent job on there. That was through the late 1990s, and here we are in 2022, and I’ve been through a lot of things, including two of my own restaurants. But then the pandemic screwed up every chef’s lifestyle. 

What was it like, pivoting to work in this world you thought you hated?

Well, my family was in the Korean restaurant industry. But European cuisine is a completely different direction of flavors and ingredients. The thing about so many Asian restaurants in the U.S. is they all have the same menu. Chinese, Korean, Japanese, doesn’t mean a thing. What the heck? Why do you even need a chef for that? But restaurants with European cuisine can be constantly changing, with seasonality and all that. More freedom of creation.

So you were drawn to cooking because you wanted to cook something outside of the Korean cuisine you grew up with, restaurant-wise? 

I know Korean cuisine, and I even tried partnerships with restaurants in K-town to put some new things on their menus. But they don’t want to be more adventurous. I’m an adventurous guy. I like to invent new ideas. But I’m not a big ego person, because a big ego person cannot grow. I’m still learning, even from back when I was a dishwasher. 

Learning and growing is the best part of it all. This industry is so hard. You work every weekend. You have no lifestyle. But how I keep moving and keep making food is more creation, more challenge.

What kept you going through the pandemic?

I had to stay home for a while. So many chefs lost their jobs. But I had to keep doing something. So I’ve done consulting jobs for three restaurants in Williamsburg. And now I’m executive chef at Fandi Mata. I always wanted to do Mediterranean cuisine because my wife’s from the Mediterranean, and we go there every year. 

Where is she from exactly?

She’s of Moroccan background, but she’s from Israel, actually. Before I started this job with Fandi Mata, I went to the Mediterranean for R&D. But I’m always using Mediterranean ingredients. 

These days I eat light, and so that’s how I cook. I used to cook really heavy French cuisine. I still love French technique, but I think that style is fading out. It’s more about locally sourced American cuisine and getting lighter, rather than lots of pork and heavy cream sauce and stuff like that. 

How did the Fandi Mata job come about anyway?

They contacted me last year about it, but they couldn’t open seven days a week yet. When that changed, they contacted me again this year, so I started up with them. It helps that the restaurant is only five minutes from my apartment.

Since you’ve mostly done French and European cuisine with Korean influences in the past, what was different about your approach for this place?

I started thinking about the whole Mediterranean area, from Morocco all the way up to Lebanon, southern France, southern Italy, and north Africa and Israel and Syria. 

Many of the things on our Mediterranean menu, we actually we eat at home because my wife is from there. We always have hummus on the dinner table. And the restaurant’s food costs are going down, because we don’t use many dairy products or cheese, and we don’t use much meat.

What does your wife’s family think of your Mediterranean cooking?

Oh, they love it. 

Did they give you any pointers? 

They gave me some ideas, but many ingredients are still hard to find in the United States. For example, my former pastry chef who used to work for me, now he has a pastry shop in Brooklyn. He’s supplying my pastry now. I told him, “Hey, can you make some cool gelato, like Mediterranean flavors?” He started making black tahini gelato and Greek yogurt gelato, and then after a few weeks, it came out pretty damn good. These don’t have to be exact copies of what they do in the Mediterranean. The idea is I’m using family ideas with these other ingredients we can get here. 

Other than scarce ingredients, how are you handling shortages of supplies and labor? 

I’m very concerned about the quality going down. Not only the supply quality going down, but the people too. The people making the food—cooks, preps, chefs—the quality is going down. Some of them are just not skilled. Many smart people are just not in this industry anymore. They all left. So you have to hire unskilled people and train them, and you’re actually paying more than before because of the labor shortage. 

So how do you overcome that?

I have to run the kitchen with less-than-qualified people. I have to do everything separately, and many things have to be pre-batched—sauces and stuff like that. It’s unbelievable, but it’s almost impossible to find cooks out of culinary school. They don’t go to school anymore because it’s too expensive. I’m really worried about the future of this industry.

Most restaurant menu prices have gone up because of all these challenges. How has that affected your own approach to building a menu?

Oh, that’s a good question. It’s everybody’s problem in New York because we pay high rent, high labor, so we have to jack up the price. 

Any pushback on that? 

Yeah, people complain, but we have no choice. I mean, in trendy areas of Manhattan or Williamsburg, a small cup of coffee is now four dollars. It’s ridiculous. And higher prices make people stay home. My buddy works at Amazon, and he says coffee machine sales are way higher than ever before. People work from home, coffee shop prices are so expensive, so they buy a coffee machine.

How do you see getting through all this? Both yourself, and the industry overall. 

I need a life balance these days. I have a wife and kid. Next year is not going to be good for restaurants in New York. Many restaurants are going to close. They’ve already started closing, even in the trendy areas, and nobody wants to invest much in restaurants right now. But maybe some new restaurants will move in where others closed down. And good restaurants will still survive.