MICHELIN Guide’s Point Of View

Chef Junghyun Park's latest Gramercy offering is upscale, sophisticated, beautifully designed and capable of elevating Korean dining to a new level. Guests are first welcomed into the restrained lounge for tasty canapés, before moving on to a seat at the luxurious counter. Everything manages to be high-end but also cool and youthful. The night's meal is communicated to the diner via custom-designed cards that explain each course and underline key ingredients and techniques. Look out for their house-pressed oils, Korean soy sauce and rice polished in-house. Banchan are reconceived with contemporary twists, as in the outstanding oyster poached in kimchi juice, or a little box presenting whelk, mushrooms and braised tofu. Binchotan grilling plays a definitive role during parts of the meal, and that technique reaches its apex in the whole Spanish turbot—which is grilled, then braised in dried seafood stock, presented to diners, and finally returned to the kitchen to plate its supremely tender and flaky morsels. Skill and talent carries through to dessert, culminating in a rice pudding cooked with heavy cream and drizzled with intense green honey infused with pickled spruce tips.