Joo Ok

Junho Choi of Two Point Zero worked the office floor into a modern hanok for forty seats, and the square patterning carries through it in wood and jade, joo ok meaning threading precious jade marbles. The madang is an interior garden of the industrial sort, and its ceiling window frames the Empire State Building, while cut-outs elsewhere give onto the rest of midtown. The main dining room is quieter, neutral tones and wood, two seatings a night.

Chang-ho Shin opened Joo Ok in Seoul in 2016 and closed it there before reopening on West 32nd Street in September 2024, with his manager, a sous chef and a line cook, families included, following him across. Hand Hospitality brought him over, and the group's two acres upstate are farmed with Junghyun Park of Atomix, Hoyoung Kim of Moono and Dongsik Ok of Okdongsik. He moved because he wanted to be challenged.

The twelve courses cost $280 and rest on what the kitchen makes rather than buys, every jang fermented by hand, the perilla oil cold-pressed weekly from seeds grown at the restaurant's farm in Bloomingburg. Jat jeup chae sets lightly poached lobster and Korean pear in a sauce of pine nuts pressed from local ones, which Shin found more pungent and less sweet than the Korean ones, so he rebuilt the dish around the difference. Every recipe is going that way.