In every case, we felt waves of affirmation and deep curiosity for a cuisine that, up until very recently, had been marginalized as merely convivial drinking food (kalbi and soju certainly do make for a fun evening), or a cool filling for a street taco (bless you, Roy Choi), or a night out in a single neighborhood enclave (the proliferations of Koreatowns across the country is impressive). What has become clear is that Korean food has finally been embraced as one of America’s truly great cuisines. This country has had enduring love affairs with French food and Italian food, and of course, Mexican food. And now Korean food is, confidently, joining that list.

So how did we get here? And why was 2024 the year that Korean food found a permanent seat at the table? It comes down to three things. OK, it comes down to many things, but these three are key to understanding the energy that has created this moment.

1. Spicy, gutsy, sweet … and familiar.

 The menu at New York City’s modern pojangmacha Seoul Salon illustrates how Korean cooking today, while sticking to tradition, can feel downright similar to classic American comfort food. Traditional tteokbokki are dolloped with splashes of cream for a K-town version of vodka sauce. Canned corn, Gruyère, and pork jowl join forces in a cheesy casserole. Tteokgalbi, essentially a Korean hamburger patty, is sweetened with mirin and orchard fruit. And then the fryer enters the picture, bearing fried shrimp and cheese, sweet potato fries, and the iconic double fried chicken. Though these are all fully Korean at their core, we’ve seen similar iterations of familiar sounding, Western-adjacent dishes time after time across America. There’s Peter’s Cho’s corned beef soo yook at Portland’s Han Oak, which is essentially Ashkenazi-style brined brisket served in a flavorful bone broth. A blue crab tostada is a menu fixture at Yangban in Los Angeles, swapping  salsa roja and shredded lettuce for a gochujang-based vinegar sauce and perilla leaves. At the much hyped Coqodaq, you’ll find triple-fried chicken nuggets from a Korean chef channeling the Golden Arches.

It’s clear that Korean American chefs have utilized a strategy of bringing familiar flavors and concepts to their menus, as though American flavors could serve as a great Trojan horse — the hybridized cooking grabbing the attention and headlines, with the follow-through being more challenging dishes that land closer to the heart of the Korean table. Yet some traditional Korean food is indelibly inspired by the west. Take budae jjigae, sometimes called army base stew, a defiant marriage of kimchi jjigae with Western additions like hot dogs, Spam, and Kraft Singles melted on top. While the dish has found champions, from The New York Times to Anthony Bourdain, and of course Keith Lee, it’s also Korean culinary canon, a staple of restaurants and homes. So while Korean food has been hybridized in America in exciting ways, its American roots also trace back to the source.

Which is to say, we don’t need the Trojan horse anymore, if ever we did. Consider New York’s Kisa, a progressive restaurant concept that serves a prix fixe menu loosely inspired by kisa sikdangs — taxi driver restaurants that are popular in Korean urban centers. The options are intentionally limited. For $32, diners choose one of four main dishes — bulgogi, spicy squid, grilled pork, or bibimbap — which are accompanied by a deluge of plates of exceptional banchan. The fried seaweed rolls and cured shrimp, which can be endlessly replenished upon request, offer non-Korean diners both familiarity and tradition. (And yes, we find ourselves among a generation obsessed with both crunchy things and raw seafood.)

“We were originally thinking about Spanish tapas and Korean fried chicken, but we got the advice to cook who we are,” says David Joonwoo Yun, one of the three partners at Kisa, who grew up in Atlanta, Ga., and opened his first restaurant, C as in Charlie, in 2022. The menu there is a mashup of ideas that channel Southern comfort through a Korean American prism — think Seoul’sbury steak with cheese grits and kalbi jus. Kisa was the natural extension of this concept, and it demonstrates the evolution of Korean food in real time.

2. The “Squid Game” effect.

When we published our first book, “Koreatown,” in February 2016 — after numerous rejections from editors who insisted Korean food was “too niche” — hardly anyone could have predicted the exploding interest in Korean culture that would sweep the world in the following eight years. The wide popularity of K-drama imports on Netflix like “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” or “Squid Game,” or the Oscar success of the film “Parasite” have functioned as an excellent gateway for Korean food — especially when coupled with the meteoric rise of K-pop.

But it was 2024 when the two trends merged, and Korean food TV entered the algorithm, in the form of “Culinary Class Wars,” a food competition that debuted in September on Netflix. The show pits 100 cheftestants (20 seasoned chefs and 80 amateurs) against one another through a series of cooking challenges. Korean American chef and cookbook author Edward Lee was one of the competitors who — without spoiling the show — did pretty well. The show has been a wild success in the United States and has exposed non-Korean viewers to a deep bench of Korean cooking. One of the two judges, Jong-won Paik, runs a popular chain of 26 Korean Chinese restaurants in America called Paik’s Noodles, and, since the show’s airing, TikTok has exploded with tributes to it. And it’s hard to watch non-Koreans taste jajangmyeon (black bean paste and pork gravy ladled over fresh noodles) for the first time over and over and over without concluding that something is changing in the culture.

There’s something more afoot, though: The popularity of “Culinary Class Wars” also reflects the interest in modern Korean cooking in Korea. It highlights lesser-known ingredients and techniques like dried radish tops, perilla oil, fermented skate wing, and various styles of ramyeon (Korean-style ramen noodles) — providing a peek into the innovation happening back in Korea that echoes worldwide. The rapid ascent of “Class Wars” is, in its own way, a new iteration of the popularity of “Iron Chef,” which debuted in 1999 as an English language dub on Food Network. Kitchen Stadium made for television gold and was a gateway into Japanese cooking and culture.

3. Koreans got their Robuchon moment.

In 2005, chef Joël Robuchon opened his first restaurant in America, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas — a “ full-scale, damn-the-torpedoes, three-stars-or-bust” effort, according to R. W. Apple Jr. in The New York Times. The opening by arguably the world’s most famous chef was significant, the final step in a steady flow of Michelin-noted French chefs landing on American shores, including Guy Savoy, who followed Alain Ducasse’s debut at Essex House in New York in 2000, and Jean-Louis Palladin’s work decades prior. By the time the time Robuchon served his first purée de pomme de terre on the Vegas strip, it was clear that the French big boys had established themselves stateside, and France’s grip on fine dining in America had become complete.

This arc would repeat itself outside the Western canon in the 2010s — a time when haute cuisine was coming to revolve around Korean rather than French innovation, not just in cooking but also style and restaurant design. And if the modern fine-dining solar system is Korean, the sun is undoubtedly chef Junghyun Park, often known as JP, and his wife, Jeongeun, who goes by Ellia. Their restaurant Atomix, which opened in May 2018, was the follow-up to their well-respected first restaurant, Atoboy, which broadly changed the Korean dining landscape.

Atomix was the end result of JP’s trajectory in New York: He previously had cooked at Jungsik, a Michelin-starred import from Seoul that had earned plenty of acclaim but was still stuck in the fancy French paradigm of formalized captain service, muted decor, and the long shadow of butter, which informed much of the cooking. The Parks wanted to go further — to celebrate the breadth of Korean culture at its apex. Thus a meal at Atomix opens with a good story (literally); diners are presented with cards for each course that describe traditional preparations of “guk” (soup) or “jorim” (braises). The restaurant, in a mid-block townhouse on an anonymous stretch of Murray Hill, is all straight lines and natural materials. Diners sit around a 14-seat counter as JP personally presents each course. While the cooking leans heavily into the Parks’ interest in Korean ingredients and fermentation; the broader experience folds with Korean-made ceramics, textiles, and chopsticks. It is light years away from the legendary grills that sizzle just a couple blocks uptown in Koreatown.

Atomix represented a great evolution for Korean fine dining in New York. Just as Robuchon had done about a decade earlier, it inspired Korean chefs who had moved from Seoul and Busan to train in America and open restaurants with grand ambition. These include Jua and sister restaurant Moono, from former Jungsik executive chef Hoyoung Kim; the hand roll tasting counter Mari from chef Sungchul Shim (to go along with his Michelin-starred skewer restaurant Kochi); Oiji Mi from chef Brian Kim and Chang-ho Shin of the recently opened Joo Ok, located on the 16th floor of a Koreatown office building and part of the influential Hand Hospitality group (which operates Her Name is Han, Hojokban, and Okdongsik). And out in Queens, Hooni Kim has been quietly offering those tasting menus at Meju, in the back of his Little Banchan Shop.

But fine dining was by no means the sole engine in this revolution. Consider Simon Kim’s Cote, which took those sizzling grills and polished them up — redefining the premise of Korean barbecue by creating a bridge to the high-dollar American steakhouse. He followed that up with Coqodaq, which took Korean fried chicken and made it luxe.

Meju is Hooni Kim fully stretched out and at peace with his unique place in Korean dining in New York City. He ran the first Michelin-starred Korean restaurant in New York, the newly reopened Danji, and his latest serene approach functions as a foil to Simon Kim’s always-on exuberance. The two can both share credit, along with the Parks of Atomix and many others, for getting us to this place of mainstream appreciation.

So what’s next for Korean food in America?

For the next decade, questions around ownership (or lack there of) of Korean cuisine will become more and more prescient. Korean food is evolving at the speed of light — or at least the speed of a Instagram refresh — not just on these shores but in Korea as well. So we fully expect, in our future travels, to find chefs of all backgrounds tapping into the traditions of Korean food, any old notions of authenticity left far in the past. Yes, there will be chefs who can’t find Gwangju on the map and yet will derive deep inspiration from the ingredients of Korea. This is ok! And the general sense from the chef community is wide admiration, and even wider curiosity. Chefs are seeking out traditional Korean techniques and incorporating the three critical jangs (doenjang, gochujang, and ganjang) and fermentation techniques into all styles of cooking — mostly with care. There are more quality Korean cookbooks published in English than ever before in history, and chefs are scooping them up on trips to Now Serving and Kitchen Arts & Letters.

This electricity and excitement for Korean cooking can be found with a spin around America today. We can travel to Los Angeles and check in with our friends at Yangban or Baroo, both receiving considerable praise in one of America’s most exciting restaurant cities. We could also look to Washington, D.C., where Danny Lee and Angel Barreto of Mandu and Anju are two of the most distinct voices in Korean cooking in America. At Anju in particular, Barreto, a chef of Black and Puerto Rican heritage, pushes boundaries with dishes like beef and Gruyère mandu, bobbing in doenjang broth with caramelized onions. It’s Bologna-meets-Busan, and nobody who has tasted it will second-guess his natural instinct for cooking soulful Korean dishes that defy geography.

We could also look outside of the biggest cities, to Austin, Texas, where Claudia Lee and Richard Hargreave opened Underdog in 2023. Hargreave is a Momofuku veteran who served in management positions at Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney, Australia, and helped open Majordomo in Los Angeles, along with other projects within the group. Lee, who is Korean, worked in the wine industry in Los Angeles, where the two met before moving to Austin. Hargreave describes his restaurant as a modern bistro and wine bar that is “intuitive in its use of Korean products and technique,” he says, adding that local ingredients are essential — and the single greatest local ingredient is Texas beef.

Originally this translated to a beef-heavy menu, including kalbi from local Legacy Farms, before a pivot to something more interesting: a menu that’s still bistro-adjacent but less overtly reliant on Korean classics. This means creative plays like yukhoe (raw beef) with a grits cracker and grilled oysters with chicharron kimchi butter. “It’s pork, kimchi, and oysters, which is like the holy trinity of Korean cooking,” he says, referencing the classic bo ssam preparation. Underdog avoids putting too much Korean verbiage on the menu, which in fact is not dissimilar to a movement in Seoul: a surge of modern bistros like Buto, Mutin, and Restaurant Allen, where European, Australian, and American wines are served alongside menus that incorporate Korean and Western influences with equal aplomb. (That Hargreave worked at David Chang’s Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney brings this full circle.).

Or look to Ann Arbor, Mich., where chef Ji Hye Kim has been nominated for multiple James Beard awards for her work at Miss Kim. Kim, who trained at legendary Midwestern deli Zingerman’s, is a scholar of Korean cooking who has a deep interest in the nuances of temple cuisine, which has been done a slight disservice by its singular portrayal as cooking organized around restriction (salt, alliums, and, of course, animal products). Kim is busy working on a new restaurant, Little Kim, which she plans to use to shatter myths around Korean plant-based cooking — and solidify her skill for merging Midwestern produce (and practicality) with the traditions of Korea.

Little Kim will be fast-casual, and largely plant-based, and will offer the Ann Arbor community dishes like dubu jorim (braised tofu), bibim guksu (cold noodles with a spicy broth), and ssambap (steamed rice, vegetable wraps, and various banchan). But also French fries, served with eight Korean-inspired dipping sauces flavored with seaweed and doenjang, since after all it’s a college town. “Just to be clear, we are not doing temple food,” she says with a smile, which is to say that garlic, onions, and even cheese will show up. “Temple food, at its core, is about the preciousness of life and is hardly dogmatic.”

Both Hargreave and Kim have tapped into something we see at the core of Korean food’s future: regionality. With Italian food, for example, Americans are now super fluent in the differences between Tuscany and Sicily. We know that butter and stuffed pasta are from the north, while garlic and tomatoes belong to the south. We believe Korean food has a similar path to follow, and while the whole of South Korea is only the size of Indiana, there is a future where Korean food is not framed by the name of a dish — jjigae here, samgyeopsal there — but by its region of origin. Buckwheat noodles from near Sokcho in the northeast, pristine clams from Busan down south. Others share this view. “Korean restaurateurs are now focusing on the regions of Korea in a meaningful way,” says Yun of Kisa, citing New York’s Ariari, which channels Busan seafood, and Odre, which looks to Gangwon-do. “It’s really fun to watch. One day we will have a Jeolla Province restaurant here in New York.” That day may come much sooner than we expect.