Dinner at Junghyun and Ellia Park’s tasting counter starts with Korean vocabulary lessons and moves on to explore cuisine and culture.
A card is set down in front of you before each new course arrives at Atomix, the tasting-menu restaurant in Murray Hill run by Junghyun Park and his wife, Jeungeun. Each is printed with a boldface transliteration of a Korean word under an abstract design of geometric shapes and lines. They look like flashcards from a school run by progressive graphic designers.
“Your first course is guk, which means soup,” a server will say.
“This card is for hwe, Korean for raw.”
“Jorim is next. Jorim means it’s been braised.”
This sounds as if it would get old, but it doesn’t. Very early on, you learn that on the other side of these vocabulary exercises lie dishes of wonderful intricacy, sophistication and beauty. One after another, each of the 10 courses in the $175 meal opens up new ideas about Korean cuisine and culture. In the Atomix pedagogical method, instruction is followed closely by reward. (While we are working on vocabulary: The restaurant’s name is pronounced, somewhat counterintuitively, a-toe-mix.)
Many of the rewards are the kind you eat, of course. Guk-which-means-soup is a shimmering broth that Mr. Park, the chef, makes from fermented tomatoes and kelp; chilled and poured over scallop slices layered between slivers of green tomato that have been marinated in Korean fig vinegar, the broth has an electrifying sweet-sour balance.
The dish may not scream “Korean cuisine,” but the next one does. This is hwe — Korean for raw, you’ll recall, and also the term for Korean-style sashimi. The fish is striped jack, brushed with plum vinegar sauce. Slices of it are folded around a mild fermented chile, a few drops of sesame oil and bits of kimchi made from cabbage and ramps. Sitting over each slice of jack is a crisp square of gim, which the Japanese call nori. Pinch some fish inside the gim and eat it, and the flavors that unspool are some of those that are brought to the table with Korean sashimi, but they’re put together with a harmony that’s hard to achieve when you swab them yourself under the influence of a few glasses of soju.
Inspired by a poem from the Choson era, Mr. Park summoned an entirely different set of flavors for the hwe on Atomix’s opening menu, which ran from late May to early September. Then, the fish was sea bream, firm and chewy, marinated overnight with ginger in a magnificently good tangerine vinegar from the island of Jeju. Eaten with sea urchin, plain spinach, sparkling shards of jelly made from pale young soy sauce, and Chinese-mustard leaves fermented in some wonderful way, it was so deeply harmonic I wouldn’t have minded if Mr.
