Atomix Turns Intellectual Dining Into a Playful Art

Stephen King once quipped that “you have never seen a book entitled One Hundred Great Introductions of Western Civilization or Best-Loved Forewords of the American People,” and the same could be said of an opera program, a theater playbill, or a museum didactic, those detailed wall blurbs that try to make sense of a Dali or a Picasso. Visitors, after all, don’t leave MoMA raving about a brilliantly penned caption; they rave about witnessing one of the world’s great collections. Diners, just the same, don’t get excited about a thrilling rendition of menu copy. They get excited about good food and service.

Restaurants, like good books or paintings, are often best enjoyed as they are, without someone explaining what everything means before each new plate of pasta. That’s why, at first glance, one might raise an eyebrow at Atomix, the tasting-menu sequel to small plates-centric Atoboy. It’s a modern Korean spot that produces as much reading material as it does food. After shelling out the full price of dinner online, guests descend to the lower floor of a Midtown East townhouse, take seats around a marble chef’s counter, and spend the next two and hours drinking, eating, and chatting. And studying.

Eggplant with eel four ways — sauced, powdered, smoked, and moussed — practically melts on the tongue like fresh burrata. It’s a two-bite dish. And yet it’s accompanied by a menu card that’s 240 words long. The reading process literally takes longer than the eating process.

The cards are repeated for each of the 10 or so courses. And against all odds (um, remember Romera?), they help make Atomix one of the city’s most exciting new bastions of haute gastronomie in years. As forgettable as it might be, a museum caption — or something like it — can sometimes offer just the right amount of guidance.

Ellia Park, who runs Atomix with her partner, chef Junghyun Park, places a card in front of me. On the front is a depiction of fish scales in abstract form. On the opposite side is a list of ingredients and small essay. I ignore it.

Servers, dressed in loose gray tops designed by Sungho Ahn, parade out plates of golden eye snapper colored like Easter eggs. The skin shimmers in a vibrant hue of pink, while an omelet pancake covers the underbelly. The charcoal-singed exterior lends smoke and crunch to the fatty flesh, while the egg imparts a hint of sweetness. And a tiny quenelle of jinjang sauce — more on what that is in a second — adds an intense savoriness. Nothing is complicated or ambiguous about the masterful dish; the components are enjoyable without additional explanation.

But out of curiosity, I check the card, wondering what type of diesel-powered flavor motor was powering the sauce. Traditional dried anchovy. And what was that wonderfully thick texture from? Modernist flourishes like xanthan gum and agar agar, per a list of ingredients as long as that of a Snickers bar. And a month after the meal, I read that little essay, about how the sauce owes its complexity to an aged soy called jinjang — that’s been fermented for five years. So what was apparently just another delicious dish is actually, the diner understands, something more meaningful and contextual, a blending of the new and the old.

One of the chief ignominies of the modern tasting temple is that menus are either banished altogether or transformed into inscrutable lists of nouns (my favorite: “Wagyu, porcini, garden”). Neither option does much good when you’re trying to prime your palate for a one-bite course, or when you want something more detailed than an iPhone pic to jog your memory following a long dinner. Atomix’s cards solve that problem, letting guests focus on minor components they might overlook, like the dried sea cucumber innards used to season thinly sliced beef.

But more broadly, the cards convey deeper meaning to anyone who wants to think beyond whether a meal simply tastes good, answering the type of questions that would otherwise involve recording an interview with the chef or buying a restaurant’s 10-pound coffee table cookbook. Like an opera program that helps a viewer navigate the minutiae of Tosca, or a gallery blurb that lets visitors make sense a perplexing Cubist work, the menu cards serve an equally important purpose. They employ a bit of unobtrusive explaining to make a complicated and expensive art form more accessible.

After a flight of amuses — the best of which is a Tostitos-style scoop chip made from mussel juices instead of corn — a waiter presents guests a fabric case filled with chopsticks. Some are blue and shiny. Others are matte and textured. The gesture recalls a touch of absurdity that plagued the early days of Alain Ducasse at the Essex House (RIP), where guests were asked to choose their squab knives and pick from a cornucopia of pens with which to sign their (astronomical) bill.

True to form, the Parks command the type of prices one would expect for this style of dining: $175, or $225 after tax and service. That easily puts Atomix in the same ballpark as some of the city’s venerable European, American, or Japanese spots, venues with which it ably competes. For a menu of this length, it’s even a tidy sum less than Jungsik ($290 after tax and tip), the two-Michelin-starred bastion of Korean fine dining in Tribeca, where chef Park served as the chef de cuisine.

If Jungsik is about elevating and refining traditional Korean dishes, with its foie gras mandoo and its short-rib galbi, Park’s cooking here is more freeform, treating the East Asian peninsula more as a firm point of inspiration than a culinary bible.

He forms a small nest out of slithery baby shrimp, anoints them with slices of radish pickled in cherry blossom vinegar, and juxtaposes the study in white with a puree of orange persimmon — all the colors of a Creamsicle. The restrained sugars and floral notes wouldn’t feel out of place at a high-end kaiseki spot.

He assembles banchan, the classic Korean side dish, out of Hokkaido uni, fresh tofu, and chestnut puree. The genius isn’t how the three flavors match — they don’t — it’s how the three powerful flavors register at the same level. Even the soybean curd bursts with a next-degree earthiness.

He pairs a French-style seared duck breast, preternaturally crispy and musky, with a thick paste whose complex notes of raisins, cumin, and chocolate recall... Mexican food? The menu card, as it turns out, explains the sauce as a gochujang mole.

Like at almost any (and quite frankly too many) tasting-menu venues, stereotypical international luxuries make regular appearances here. But Atomix’s use of them comes across less like a crutch, and more like a genuine innovation. The chef whittles halibut into a round disc. The first bite is soft, flaky, mild. A second bite reveals a layer of foie gras terrine underneath, imparting a buttery oomph to the neutral fish. A third bite causes the liver to spill out, clouding the surrounding pool of squash dashi with its pink hue.

Park eschews stereotypical caviar pairings. Instead, he places firm beads of golden osetra atop a parfait of fresh cheese and pine-nut puree. The dairy tames the maritime oils while the sweet pignoli counteracts the roe’s rampant salts. The ingredients are absurdly refined, but the interplay of sugar, salt, and fat is little different than in a breakfast of pancakes with syrup, butter, and bacon.

And while a few bits of wagyu are little different from their counterparts elsewhere, what is different are the accompaniments: a small pool of pear juice and a tidy row of fermented garlic, ramps, and wasabi leaves. Their purpose is simple: To cut through the richness.

The meal winds down with an ice of hydrangea tea, followed by a melange of corn marmalade, roasted corn, and sesame oil ice cream. The latter dessert channels the powerfully vegetal notes of maize with a level of subtlety that recalls the famed husk pudding at Cosme, one of the city’s best Mexican spots. Atomix might be a Korean restaurant, but like New York — or at least the New York we dream of — it earns its keep by transcending borders and defying trends.