This Hidden Korean Tasting Menu Is LA’s Most Exciting New Restaurant

Perhaps the most exciting new modern Korean restaurant in Los Angeles opened on January 16 in the basement of a Little Tokyo office building. Ki, named after its chef Ki Kim, serves a multi-course counter tasting menu for $285 per person that weaves through a deeply personal narrative while exploring various facets of Korean ingredients, cooking techniques, and flavors. Already, the dishes evince a maturity one might expect from a decades-long operation, with Kim’s co-chefs Ryan Brown and Shingo Kato bringing their own culinary firepower to the intimate dining experience.

During most of the dinner service, the chefs zig-zag around, dusting plates of grilled lobster slices over doenjang butter sauce with raspberry powder or slicing a rosemary-roasted Colorado lamb saddle into bite-sized pieces. Against the backdrop of a slew of modernist tasting menu restaurants that have opened in recent weeks, including Santa Monica’s Seline and West Hollywood’s Somni , Ki is writing its own captivating chapter with the distinct hues of Korean cuisine. Kim arrived in Los Angeles after a lengthy fine dining journey: He worked most recently as the chef de cuisine at Meteora, a position he held while it earned its first Michelin star.



Prior to that, Kim operated his own modestly priced tasting menu restaurant Kinn in Koreatown, drawing praise from Los Angeles Times critic Bill Addison and other publications . Addison, in particular, suggested the food at Kinn could be part of the evolving future of fine dining in Los Angeles. That prediction might come to pass at Ki, which joins late 2023’s celebrated return of Baroo in the Arts District and the Michelin-recognized Hibi in Koreatown, which serves its own Korean and Japanese-inflected food.

Ki seems to aim to cook at a level with other highly regarded counters like Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, Atomix, and Catbird Seat. After the rigamarole of finding the place (just check into the host stand for Kaneyoshi and Bar Sawa), find a long, wide counter that seats up to 12 diners, though most nights will only accommodate eight. The prevailing themes of Kim’s menu are “comfort and elegance,” words he used often in a recent conversation with Eater over the phone.

Part of that starts with the restaurant’s only available dining time of 6:30 p.m. (tastings that attempt to accommodate two turns often end up with a too-early 5 p.

m. or 5:30 p.m.

reservation and then a too-late 8:30 p.m. or 9 p.

m. second service, he says). Once situated, Kim gives a brief overview and immediately serves the first of three snacks: the alien-like orb of cod milt (also called shirako) tinted with a pale red-orange kimchi sauce atop a tiny ball of rice and a cylinder of crispy bugak seaweed.

Kim loves gimbap and wanted to conjure his favorite Korean snack: “While cod milt is typical in haemul-tang [seafood stew], I wanted to capture the harmonious flavors of rice and banchan, where you make your own combination with every bite,” he says. He would serve the cod milt gimbap through the year, but the featured ingredient is only available in the winter, which means he’ll switch it up in spring. The unexpected crisp of the bugak and the sweet, almost creamy milt makes the bite a highly memorable start.

Delicate horse mackerel slices wrapped around aged baek-kimchi, or kimchi without any gochugaru, and perilla leaf are another snack. Kim’s now signature crispy octopus with a rich octopus head sauce comes as the third in the lineup. Kim’s particularly proud of the grilled lettuce (sangchu) ice cream, which he conceived by charring, dehydrating, and then infusing an ice cream base.

The chungju cream, which uses the unfiltered rice beverage, adds a slightly sweet contrast to the earthy quenelle of lettuce ice cream. Here he presents a solid dollop of Astrea caviar, a brand he likes because it’s sourced from older sturgeons, which has less “pop” in the texture but a richer umami finish. “It took me several years to realize that caviar is actually good,” said Kim.

“When I had a caviar dish served with asparagus ice cream at Aska in New York, it was a shocking thing, and caviar with ice cream got stuck in my head,” he says. Once firmly into the main courses, Kim and the crew feature a steamed sea perch with scarlet prawn, dry-aged dairy cow with roasted sesame, creamy perilla noodles topped with shaved winter truffles, and charcoal-grilled lobster tail with doenjang sauce and raspberry powder. The savory courses culminate in a lamb saddle carved on the counter and served with smoked tomato-stuffed morels.

“Morels are typically served in spring, and the ‘next season’ approach is like Japanese kaiseki ‘hashiri,’ which means embracing what’s coming,” says Kim. Though lamb isn’t as popular as beef, chicken, or pork in South Korea, it’s growing in popularity. Kim says he fell in love with lamb when he immigrated to the U.

S., landing in the town of Aurora near Denver. “I struggled to fit in and it was a huge change in my life.

I was an angry teenager and couldn’t enjoy myself, but lamb was something I really liked in Colorado,” says Kim. The chef shared his mental health journey in the aftermath of the closure of Kinn, a struggle that he says therapy helped to relieve. Serving the lamb here represents a kind of triumph, an acknowledgment of past challenges that have been overcome or are still in the cycle of progress.

The meal finishes with omija, a Korean berry so complex the name refers to its five distinct flavors of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and pungent, prepared as shaved ice with strawberry lemon, and cranberry. Kim and the kitchen team are already thinking about what they plan to serve in the spring — not content to keep the dishes stagnant. Ki, the restaurant, represents a relentless pursuit, a standard-setting dinner that could reshape Los Angeles’s perception of the possibilities of Korean cuisine.

Whether it joins the conversation started by Kim’s former employer Jungsik and Atomix in New York City, Baroo here in LA, Jeong in Chicago, and Ssal in San Francisco, remains to be seen, but fine dining fans should definitely be excited. Ki is open Wednesday to Sunday, with one seating at 6:30 p.m.

Reservations are available on Tock , with tickets priced at $285 per person. Wine pairing costs $190 with a full wine and Korean spirits menu as well. Related Sign up for our newsletter.

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