24 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
1
TABLESFORTWO
PHOTOGRAPH BY JANELLE JONES FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
Kochi
652 Tenth Ave.
The other night at Kochi, a new Korean
restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, I decided to
conduct an experiment. Dinner here is
tasting-menu-only: nine courses, most of
them skewers, from the chef Sungchul
Shim, who worked at Per Se and Neta. At
seventy-five dollars, it seemed, compared
with similar offerings, to be unusually
reasonably priced—half as much, for in-
stance, as the skewer tasting menu at To-
rien, a new spinoff of a renowned Tokyo
yakitori bar. And yet my server pushed, if
gently, a handful of steeply priced supple-
ments: osetra caviar, black truffles, uni,
Wagyu beef. Were they necessary? Was
this a hundred-and-fifty-dollar tasting
menu posing as a seventy-five-dollar one?
Was I in danger of being suckered by a
marketing ploy? I’d find out, by declining
them all on my first visit and then coming
back and posing as a high roller.
I’m delighted to report my findings.
The pine-nut-and-potato-milk soup
completely swallowed up the caviar (an
extra fifteen dollars)—not to mention the
fact that, by the time a chef had painstak-
ingly mounded the fish eggs in the tiny
bowl (and applied, with tweezers, wisps of
gold leaf and a minuscule flower, plucked
from a minuscule stem), the otherwise
fantastic soup, pleasingly warm on my
initial visit, had gone cold.
The first time I had the slow-cooked
chicken terrine, I was deeply impressed
by the paper-thin slices of raw cremini
mushroom that overlaid the meat. They
were stirringly earthy, delicate, and sweet.
I thought it would be a shame to over-
power them with shaved black truffle
(seventeen dollars), and, by my second
visit, the restaurant seemed to have come
to the same conclusion; the supplement
was no longer on the menu.
I admit that Wagyu beef is obscenely
rich, that the fat sort of crackles on your
tongue before melting like butter. During
my second meal at Kochi, it took the
place of a rib-eye patty that had been
served in pieces, kebab-like, on a skewer;
the glistening, marbled slices of Wagyu
(forty-three dollars) were, without ques-
tion, more memorable. And yet the com-
parison seemed almost moot—because
the most compelling part of the dish was,
again, a relatively standard mushroom,
this time a king trumpet. Carved into fan-
tastically juicy, almost creamy segments,
it held up beautifully to the char of the
binchotan grill and to a swipe of pungent
black-garlic-and-chestnut purée.
Throughout the meal, I found myself
reëvaluating ingredients that I had come
to consider prosaic. Mackerel, so often oily
and bluntly fishy, was mellow and meaty,
crowned with frizzled leeks and served
atop sticky-sweet Japanese eggplant in avinaigrette made with yuzu and makgeolli,
a cloudy Korean rice wine. Yellowtail, that
standby of the sushi bar, became newly
rousing—cut into fat, sweet, pure-tasting
squares, paired with a tart tiger’s milk (a
Peruvian-style citrus-based marinade), a
dribble of gochujang, and a salad of tiny
half-moons of crunchy cucumber and
radish shredded as fine as confetti.
Would it be hyperbolic to say that the
revelation that perilla (a Korean cousin of
Japanese shiso) makes a sensational kim-
chi is more valuable to me than a hundred
lobes of uni? Perhaps—but I’d be happy to
eat uni once a year and perilla kimchi every
morning with rice for breakfast. At Kochi,
the kimchi was a garnish on a skewer of
bo ssäm, for which pork belly was cooked
for fourteen hours. That said, of all the
supplements, the uni, offered with a bowl
of bibimbap, made the most sense, turn-
ing the sticky mixture of soy-butter rice,
candied anchovy, and spicy pollock roe
into something supple and pudding-like.
If thirteen dollars are burning a hole
in your pocket, I’d recommend that par-
ticular upcharge. The heart of Kochi’s
appeal, though, is Shim’s ability not to
simply deliver luxury but to coax it out of
the ordinary. The menu is partly inspired
by Korean royal-court cuisine, a multi-
course style eaten by the ruling family
during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910),
which was lavish yet nourishing and
wholesome. Without the supplements,
Kochi’s menu feels opulent but also re-
strained, indulgence for the everyday.
(Tasting menu starts at $75.)
—Hannah Goldfield