Corey Lee is clear-eyed about the simplest truth of his profession: it’s about making people happy. Strip away the accolades, the technique, the meticulous attention to detail, and what remains is the heart of the thing — feeding people in a way that makes life a little better, if only for a moment.
Raised in the United States but with roots planted firmly in South Korea, Lee’s culinary journey bridges two worlds, his career a study in discipline and quiet ambition. Having cut his teeth in some of the world’s most demanding kitchens, most notably spending nine years at three-MICHELIN-Starred and Green Star restaurant The French Laundry, he opened his first restaurant, Benu, in San Francisco in August 2010. In 2014, Benu was awarded three MICHELIN Stars.
With all the accolades and awards under his belt, Lee is a man who looks backward as much as he is forward. At his new restaurant Na Oh, located in the Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore (HMGICS), he draws deeply from his Korean heritage — not so much as a nostalgic gesture, but, perhaps, in a way to preserve something fragile and essential.
At Na Oh, one of the opening dishes is a buckwheat jeon with mugeunji (a type of aged kimchi), served with a salad of greens harvested from the HMGICS smart farm.
“Jeon, to me, is an important dish because Koreans can easily relate to it,” he explains. “It has evolved in a way where it touches on so many aspects of people's lives. There are also regional variations of jeon, and I believe the expansive role it plays in the lives of Koreans makes it a really special dish.”
Whether at Benu, Na Oh, or through the simple act of everyday eating, Lee remains obsessed with how food connects to personal identity and heritage. For him, the answer lies not in the gleaming kitchens or the dazzling artistry of fine dining, but simply at home. The soul of a cuisine, he believes, isn’t found in spectacle — it lives in the quiet, unspoken rituals of home kitchens, where food is prepared not to impress critics, but to nourish the people who matter most.
“One thing that I really find charming about Korean cuisine is that there's really no perfect version of any dish; some of it — so much of it — is rooted from your home and what you grew up with.”
Lee expounds that jeon was not just food for him, but more of a building block from where loving memories were formed. “I remember my mother making trays and trays of them, and the smell filling our home. My father would have end-of-the-year gatherings, and my mother would spend all day making different kinds of jeon. It wasn’t something we had every day, and that made it feel like a real treat.”
On the topic of Korean food as a whole, Lee sees preservation and fermentation as the soul of his home country’s cuisine. In a land of blistering summers and unforgiving winters, food preservation was not optional; it was the difference between making it through the season or not. And in the necessary process of extending the life of their food, Koreans didn’t just survive — they created something uniquely delicious.
The taste of jang (sauces made with fermented soybean paste), for example, or the tang of a perfectly aged kimchi isn’t simply a byproduct of fermentation — it’s a cultural inheritance, a quiet link to those who came before. Of course, no cuisine can — or should — stay frozen in time. Lee welcomes the modern impulses shaping Korean food today. New ingredients, new methods are being embraced by the present league of chefs, but it is Lee’s hope that the anchor of home cooking does not get lost.
“The strength of a cuisine isn’t in how it changes, but in how it holds onto its essence while it evolves. The only way to do that is to have a deep reference point, and that comes from what your parents and grandparents cooked for you,” he affirms.
For Lee, cooking goes beyond just feeding people, it’s about leaving a mark. Not the flashy kind that demands a spotlight, but a quieter, more enduring legacy. Being a chef, in his view, means stepping into a lineage that stretches far beyond one’s own career — a responsibility to honour the past while nudging it, ever so gently, into the future.
"Well, I believe as a chef, everything that you learn, everything that you know… it started from somewhere else. And that's really what's special about being a chef. You're part of this long line of traditions," he says. "If you can and if you have the opportunity, you leave a small thumbprint, and then pass that on to the next generation — and hopefully, they'll expand on that."
“I believe my responsibility is the same responsibility that previous generations of chefs and cooks have had, which is to really be a diligent student and understand culinary methods, techniques, and recipes in a deep way.”
In Lee’s mind, chefs are not just cooks; they are custodians of tradition, charged with understanding and preserving culinary methods in a world that often prizes novelty over depth. It’s an approach rooted in humility, knowing that every technique one masters was first taught by someone else, and that one’s job is to protect, to refine, and to pass it on.
This idea is especially potent for Lee as a Korean chef, where food is as much about memory as it is about sustenance. While his professional life is rooted in the rarefied air of fine dining, his heart remains tied to the simple dishes such as the humble jeon, which carry the weight of centuries. For Lee, to cook is to be part of a story far older than one’s self, one that deserves to be told with care, curiosity, and reverence.
And if you’re lucky, you get to add your own chapter.
