Seoul Searching

Ryunique’s Tae Hwan Ryu on the art of plating, the scarcity of Korean fine-dining and the importance of sourcing locally.

- Tiffany Chan

There aren’t many Korean chefs in the world of fine-dining. Chef Tae Hwan Ryu, the man behind Ryunique in Seoul – placed on San Pellegrino’s Asia’s and World’s Best Restaurants lists within three years of opening – is perhaps one of the most well-known.

He wasn’t always a chef, however. Until he was 22 years old, he’d wanted to be an artist. But then his father encouraged him to change his mind and become a chef, something his dad had wanted to do himself. An oceanographer, his father was a meticulous, analytical man, who feared his son would live a hard life as an artist, and so steered him towards the kitchen.

“He felt a chef ’s life would be a good and meaningful one,” Tae says. “I just knew [I] was passionate about wanting to create something.”

The young Korean chef trained all over the world – five years in Japan, one in Australia and two years with Gordon Ramsay, in Britain. In Japan, he learned the art of precision. In the Britain, he “felt like a cooking machine” and developed “an inherent kind of fear in cooking and obsession with perfection”. In Australia, he learned to take advantage of ingredients in their raw forms, especially seafood.

His travels culminated in a style that is French in presentation, Japanese in technique, but Korean in essence – what he calls “hybrid cuisine”. He opened Ryunique, a handsome but unpretentious restaurant with only five tables serving only one tasting menu in the affluent Gangnam neighbourhood of Seoul, in 2011. At the time, there weren’t many Korean chefs in fine-dining, and even fewer plating Korean dishes, as it’s not considered a “fine” cuisine.