Looking around Haenyeo’s dining room one night in early March, I thought maybe Jenny Kwak’s time has finally come.
Her third restaurant, Haenyeo was about three months old and already filled with people who looked as if they’d been going there for years. It sits on a prime corner lot, on a stretch of Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that is rich in local minichains serving banh mi, burritos, lobster rolls and so on, to take out or eat in. Intimidating restaurants don’t tend to prosper here.
Very few people inside Haenyeo look the least bit intimidated as they lift grilled oysters by the shell to pour the dregs of hot seaweed butter over toast; or carve wedges of zucchini-scallion pancakes fried to a dark and satisfyingly rich brown; or stir mushrooms, squid, bean sprouts, steamed spinach and cabbage kimchi with a just-cracked egg into a bibimbap whose bottom layer of rice is golden and crunchy where it meets the hot stone bowl.
The customers at Haenyeo seem to have an easy familiarity with Korean food. Some of them, at least, can probably thank Ms. Kwak for that. In 1992, when she began serving the cuisine in the East Village at her first restaurant, Dok Suni’s, the words tteokbokki and seolleongtang and jajangmyeon did not roll off the tongues of most non-Koreans. But that’s who she wanted to lure in with American music, date-night décor and Western-style service. Once she had them, she would tempt, teach, turn them on to the flavors she’d grown up with. Her mother, Myung Ja Kwak, shared cooking duties.
Jenny Kwak has been turning New Yorkers on to Korean food for 25 years.CreditCaitlin Ochs for The New York Times
Ms. Kwak’s was not the take-it-or-leave-it approach of 32nd Street, and she kept at it. She wrote “Dok Suni: Recipes From My Mother’s Korean Kitchen,” which was one of the few Korean cookbooks in English when it came out, in 1998. At her second restaurant, Do Hwa, she and her mother led customers deeper into unfamiliar ground.
Each of the restaurants stayed open for about two decades, which is a very long time in New York. If you want a metaphor for how effectively Ms. Kwak paved the way for restaurants like Atoboy, Soogil, Danji and others whose chefs weave Korean cuisine into new patterns, consider that one of them, Oiji, moved into its address on First Avenue right after Dok Suni’s moved out.
What Ms. Kwak is doing in Park Slope isn’t all that different from what she has done all her career, except that by now South Korean comfort food has become comfort food for New York in general.
Haenyeo does pay more attention to seafood than Dok Suni or Do Hwa did, though. Ms. Kwak hasn’t gone pescatarian on us. She still serves impressive pork and beef bulgogis with ssamjang and lettuce, and the pan-fried dumplings are filled with high-fat ground beef seasoned with kimchi, garlic and soy. But her menu’s orientation has shifted slightly toward the ocean. This is good news, because the seafood at Haenyeo has a sparkle and sweetness you don’t always find in the smoke-filled rooms of 32nd Street.
A bibimbap variant may be the menu’s sleeper dish, partly because it starts out looking like a lunch bowl from Sweetgreen. It is a version of hwe dup bap. At first you just see raw tuna, shredded romaine and perilla leaves, grated carrots and cucumber, and strips of seaweed. Hidden underneath is warm rice. But there is a pink mound of spicy cod roe in the bowl, too, with cured salmon eggs and a few lobes of sea urchin. Both of them will break apart as you stir, bringing their distinct saltwater intonations to the rice and vegetables.
What the menu calls “white fish fillets” — pan-fried cod with rings of scallion showing through their thin gold sheet of egg batter, otherwise known as saeng seon jeon — is so modestly named it might get overlooked; it shouldn’t. The menu plays Don’t Mind Me again with “mackerel, grilled or braised.” Just get the mackerel, because the kitchen knows how to cook it, whether over a flame or in a dark, smoky pan of garlic and gochujang.
In truth, the kitchen seems to know how to cook every kind of seafood, although perhaps it could come with a better partner for the fried scallops than the sweet, yellowish tartar sauce with corn in it.
The walls are hung with photographs of Korean women in wet suits. These are the haenyeo of Jeju island, who dive up to 30 feet deep for conch, abalone and seaweed while holding their breath for several minutes at a time. The money they made diving is probably the reason parts of Jeju have a matriarchal family structure. Naming the restaurant after them, Ms. Kwak continues a theme started with Dok Suni’s, which means “strong women’s.”
One dish that seems out of place is a revival of Dok Suni’s fried chicken. Was the batter always so pasty and airless? That’s not how I remember it, but it’s possible my standards have changed as Korean fried chicken has infiltrated nearly every part of town over the past decade. In any case, there is better chicken to seek out here, not just the home-style dokdoritang stewed in chile sauce but also the wings. Haenyeo double-fries wings that have been dipped in potato starch, then coats them with a fine version of a yangnyeom chile sauce, tangier and a little less sweet than some.
When Ms. Kwak detours from the Korean straight and narrow, consider traipsing along behind her. You may wind up having beignets for dessert, buried under a fresh coat of powdered sugar in the best Café du Monde style. (This and the grilled oysters may betray the hand of her business partner, Terrence Segura, who is from New Orleans. He is also her husband.)
