Seoul Searching

Ryunique’s Tae Hwan Ryu on the art of plating, the scarcity of Korean fine-dining and the importance of sourcing locally.

- Tiffany Chan

There aren’t many Korean chefs in the world of fine-dining. Chef Tae Hwan Ryu, the man behind Ryunique in Seoul – placed on San Pellegrino’s Asia’s and World’s Best Restaurants lists within three years of opening – is perhaps one of the most well-known.

He wasn’t always a chef, however. Until he was 22 years old, he’d wanted to be an artist. But then his father encouraged him to change his mind and become a chef, something his dad had wanted to do himself. An oceanographer, his father was a meticulous, analytical man, who feared his son would live a hard life as an artist, and so steered him towards the kitchen.

“He felt a chef ’s life would be a good and meaningful one,” Tae says. “I just knew [I] was passionate about wanting to create something.”

The young Korean chef trained all over the world – five years in Japan, one in Australia and two years with Gordon Ramsay, in Britain. In Japan, he learned the art of precision. In the Britain, he “felt like a cooking machine” and developed “an inherent kind of fear in cooking and obsession with perfection”. In Australia, he learned to take advantage of ingredients in their raw forms, especially seafood.