Park & Park Interview — An Interview with Park Chanil and Park Junwoo

The biggest obstacle to a traveler’s experience is not language or culture but prejudice and stereotype. Preconceptions about a destination often narrow our field of vision. If the case for travel lies in its power to broaden our understanding of others and of the world, how should we, as travelers, look at and experience the diverse cultures, histories, races, and classes intertwined in a single place? In search of even a small hint of an answer, we met two people. Chefs Park Chanil and Park Junwoo treat the kitchen as their workplace, yet as if hoping that cooking never gets buried as a mere means of earning a living, they travel, write, and explore the business of eating and drinking. Their fields and specialties differ, but they are senior and junior colleagues who respect each other’s tastes and philosophies, and who share both the joys and the hardships over a glass of liquor. We asked the two chefs about their attitude toward food and toward the people and cultures that lie beyond it.

Interview compiled by Pyo Youngso
Interviewer Hur Taewoo
Photos Shin Gyucheol
C Park Chanil / J Park Junwoo

How did you become interested in Italian and French cooking? I’m curious whether it was an affinity for the culture or for the flavors.
J I didn’t really think much about it. (Laughs) After the IMF crisis, my father was posted to Belgium, and the whole family followed. I majored in modern literature at a university there, but dropped out partway. While working at a company, I drifted through side jobs for pocket money: magazine correspondent, interpreter, expatriate for a Korean company. Then suddenly I went off to Paris to study cooking. The part of Belgium where I lived was French-speaking, and it seemed hard to learn English or Spanish from scratch, so I figured I’d go to France, and if I was going, I might as well go to the capital, Paris. I had a great year of fun there. I lived in Belgium for eight years and in Paris for one.
C But don’t the French look down on the Belgians? They see them as the symbol of country bumpkins. And the Belgians dislike France just as much. They say, “They’re nothing special, yet they act so superior.”

What about when it comes to food?
J Belgians are just as proud as the French that “our food is delicious.” And they criticize French cooking for pointless fuss and high prices, saying the French don’t know what the essence of food is. It’s similar to what Italians say when they belittle the French. The French, for their part, basically think Belgian food is provincial.

When you went from Belgium to Paris to learn cooking, was it purely because you loved to cook?
J No. The longer I worked, earned money, and lived as an ordinary working person, the more I felt my chances of going back to school were shrinking. My office job wasn’t specialized, and the future was uncertain. I felt I needed something to make a living from, so I sat in on a cooking class for a year at a vocational school in Belgium. Since I’d already gotten my feet wet, and Paris is said to be the center of gastronomy, I thought I’d give it a try.
C Mine was a bit different. I hadn’t decided from the start to make cooking my career, and I hadn’t learned it as a hobby either. I was wondering what I could do to earn a living, and it turned out there was such a thing as a cook. Back then, cooks were pretty much at the bottom of society. There was no room for advancement. But I did have one thought: ‘If I work in the food business, at least I won’t starve.’ People often say, ‘If you have cooking skills, you’ll never starve.’ That’s actually kind of comical. Do you not starve just because you work at a bread factory? If you get laid off, it’s the same. I fooled myself with that conventional thinking. If making a living was what mattered, being a tiler or a plumber might have been far more advantageous. Of course, that work is hard. But is being a cook not hard? If you go into cooking as a means of making a living, I don’t think that’s right. After working hard for about 15 years, you should get a corresponding reward, but for cooks that’s very rare.
J Ah, now that you mention it, when I was thinking about studying in Paris, I had two options. One was an interior design school and the other was a culinary school. The shortest interior design course was two years, while cooking was one year. So that was part of why I chose cooking. (Laughs)
C Even before I became a cook, I loved Italy from watching films like “Il Postino,” “Cinema Paradiso,” and “Bicycle Thieves.” When I went there as a traveler, the food was truly delicious. It demolished all my stereotypes about Western food. It’s cheap, carb-centered, made with a variety of ingredients, and simple yet delicious. Partly it’s because I love liquor, but above all, it’s food that is perfect to enjoy with a drink. On a different note, the Italian home cooking I ate then was probably like bibimbap is for us, right? Later, no matter how hard I tried to recreate that flavor, it never came out the same.

You really can’t reproduce that flavor?
C You can’t. (To Chef Park Junwoo) You can’t either, right?
J Hmm… It depends on the dish. (Laughs)
C I think desserts are impossible too. It’s a psychological matter. Even if you source the ingredients directly and try, it doesn’t work. Of course, some people who have eaten it in the local place say, “It’s exactly the same,” but to my palate, it isn’t. So I gave up. I decided, ‘I’ll just do it my own way.’ I make things with Korean ingredients whenever I can. Originally, when you go to a country, you cook with that country’s ingredients. That’s not just my claim. Chefs like Paul Bocuse and Joël Robuchon opened French restaurants in Hong Kong and Japan, and they all cooked with local ingredients, because they’re cheap, fresh, and delicious. To give another example, the mozzarella you eat in Seoul isn’t mozzarella. Haruki Murakami once said that the most delicious tofu in the world is the tofu made today. Once you package and distribute it, all the subtle flavor disappears. Mozzarella made in Italy goes through packaging, air freight, food quarantine, and domestic transport, and it takes a month to reach the consumer. There’s no way it can taste like the mozzarella you eat in Italy.
J I can make things taste roughly like what I ate there. But as Chef Park Chanil said, first of all, local ingredients are hard to get, and even when you can get them, the price goes up. It’s uncomfortable to think of paying 50,000 won here for a dish that cost 10,000 won there. In short, I think you can imitate it to some extent, but a 100 percent reproduction is difficult.
C Like I said, it’s a matter of spirit. Even if a local cooked with the same ingredients, I don’t think it could become the same dish. The density of the air is different. There’s a limit of time and space that human power can’t carry over. That’s why you have to go there and eat. Tasting food is an emotional experience. Isn’t that precisely why travel is necessary?
But if you approach it with the idea of introducing another country’s food culture to Korea, whether French desserts or Italian home cooking, then using affordable ingredients to approximate the flavor so that many people can experience it might, in a way, be a reasonable approach, no?
C That’s a matter of philosophy, and everyone is free to choose. As far as possible, I try to (omitted) in that region, so I won’t use olives.
J And no lemons either.
C That kind of thing I can agree with on the level of philosophy. Of course, I’m by no means someone who cooks by deliberately declaring ‘I won’t use this,’ like René Redzepi. I use what can be imported, and where possible I try to cook with ingredients from Korea. That doesn’t mean I can say it isn’t Italian cooking. Sometimes a critic or a reporter looks at just a few dishes of mine that seem Korean and calls it “fusion.” But that’s said without really understanding the word. Fusion is an attitude of deliberately crossing and combining different cultures to create something new and better. I cook Italian food, but I’ve created my own style using alternative ingredients from Korea.
J Of course, I want to spread food culture. But running a French or Italian restaurant in Korea while sticking to authentic recipes seems unrealistic. Instead, I think that ambition can be fulfilled not through the food itself but through sharing the culture. Going around talking about how people eat this dish in its home country and why they eat it is something I can do as someone who has experienced that culture. Recently, there have been a lot of changes in Korea too. Take Italian food, for example. People don’t say “spaghetti Bolognese” so much anymore. Quite a few people have learned that tagliatelle is used for Bolognese.

This suddenly made me curious. These days, some bakeries and dessert shops emphasize that their products are made with “French organic flour.” Is there really a difference?

J They say there is. What’s generally used in Korea is American wheat. I don’t know the exact figures, but French wheat is said to be of somewhat better quality than American. That’s partly why it costs more.

C There’s another view. French wheat is imported into Korea already ground into flour. American, Canadian, and Australian wheat, on the other hand, is imported as whole grain and milled domestically. So some argue that the latter is actually much better in freshness and quality.

J That needs a closer look, too. There’s good wheat and bad wheat in France, and good wheat and bad wheat in America, right? In the import process you have to examine exactly which product is being imported, but neither sellers nor consumers go to that much trouble, so it’s true the focus ends up simply on whether it’s French or American. It’s hard to say it’s good just because it’s French. It’s like the Belgian chocolate sold at big supermarkets, which, if you look into it, is Belgian chocolate that even Belgians don’t eat.

Interest in long-standing old eateries (nopo) has grown lately, but this is also an age when you can eat food from all over the world in a food court. How should we define local food today?

C Not everything old is necessarily local, but you could say that old places have more “localness.” I think the dictionary definition still holds: regional food, made by people of that region with locally sourced ingredients and eaten by them. People generally approach local food with goodwill. To understand Hong Kong better, for example, you eat what the locals eat. Seen that way, food is a deeply humanistic field, even though cooking itself belongs to the natural sciences. You sit down with people in a place far from home, and even if the food is unfamiliar or not to your liking, you make an effort to experience it and accept it. When we see a brave foreigner take on hongeo (fermented skate) and try to find meaning in it, how much do we like them for it? When the Chinese see us happily eating cilantro (xiangcai, 香菜) while traveling in China, they’re pleased too, aren’t they? That’s because human emotion is built into local food. So people like us, cooks and travelers, don’t agree with a scientific or theoretical definition of local but with a broader one. Local food is simply interesting, first of all. And it’s cheap. Though of course, local food in Paris isn’t even cheap!

J Even local food in Paris feels different depending on whether you eat it in the 4th arrondissement or the 20th. (Laughs) The words we use to define things like this are really vague. “Local,” like “vegan,” gets interpreted at two opposite extremes. Veganism has a simple ingredient-based view, where you avoid everything from mushrooms and fungi to the flesh of dead animals, but it can also be read as a kind of social movement. That’s probably why some people feel resistance to it. Local is the same. One side takes a flexible view: anything locals eat without hesitation is local. Those who read it in social terms insist that local means “our traditional food, which our ancestors ate and which is made only with ingredients from our own land.” If you take that view, the answer to your question could turn out completely different. Personally, I tend to be skeptical of the local they talk about. If galbijjim (braised short ribs) is our traditional food, for example, since when have carrots gone into it? If you trace back to when carrots reached the Korean Peninsula, the interpretation of whether the dish is really local and traditional could run into errors. That’s how I see it.

C Generally, I think you can call something native once three generations have passed.

J When three generations live in one village, we call them natives. That’s how the term has been used, but the issue is how strictly to apply it and how far to allow its range.

Suppose 70 or 80 years have passed since Locanda Mongro opened. How should people regard Monro then? Should we call it a local restaurant?

C You don’t even need to go as far as Mongro. Take spaghetti: for the next generation, spaghetti is Korean food, because three generations will have passed since it arrived. People began to recognize spaghetti around the 1970s, and they really started eating it after the 1988 Seoul Olympics. That’s only about 50 years ago, so it hasn’t been long. It’s still a foreign food, but spaghetti now appears as a side dish with rice in children’s school lunches. At that point, it has been “localized.” After another 30 years, who could say spaghetti isn’t Korean food?

J A classic Korean sashimi spread feels incomplete without corn cheese. (Laughs) But if you try to talk about local in the sense of a social movement, it gets enormously difficult. I once saw an interview with a Swiss natural wine producer that left a strong impression on me. He absolutely hated the worldwide craze for natural wine. His reasoning was that he made an eco-friendly wine, and at some point it began spreading around the world by train and by plane. He ranted, “The way natural wine is consumed isn’t natural, so how can it be natural wine?” But by that logic, there would be nothing left to eat in the world.

C Once it travels by ship or plane, it’s no longer organic. Strictly speaking, organic farming that has capital added to it isn’t organic either. The starting point of the organic movement was to keep the land, the farmers and the people alive, and to keep agriculture from being swallowed up by capital. Think of lettuce grown in New Mexico with irrigated groundwater, with low-wage Mexican migrants picking off insects by hand, then flown to New York to be eaten. Is that really organic? The food miles would be enormous. Even in the United States there’s criticism like that: simply not spraying pesticides doesn’t make something organic. If that’s the case, I think it’s better to eat ingredients grown by conventional farming in a nearby region.

J Philosophy can’t beat the market. Ideals can’t beat capital.

People chase trends, whether organic or natural wine, and go around eating and bragging about it on social media.

C As Chef Park Junwoo says, the philosophy disappears and only capital remains. And there are people who harvest the profits from it. I find these fads exhausting. Some of what’s trendy is delicious, and some isn’t. Even when it doesn’t taste good, people are tormented by the compulsion that they have to eat it because it’s trendy.

J I think people post photos of food on social media because food is the easiest thing to show off. Compared with a house, a car, clothes or a bag, food is the most efficient in terms of opportunity cost. In the same vein, the dessert that’s popular for social media among young owners, chefs and consumers these days is baked sweets (gumgwaja). A slice of a high-end cake usually costs 9,500 to 10,000 won, but for about 2,500 won you can buy one baked sweet, photograph it and post it. Not long ago I went to a hot street in Busan, and every shop there sold only baked sweets. There wasn’t a single place selling mousse cakes or pies. People flock only to what’s cheaper and looks more impressive.

What do you think of food criticism in Korea? Abroad, there are trusted critics in the field, including the food columns in outlets like The New York Times and Le Monde.

J I think that’s because the voices in the mass media abroad are diverse. Korea, conversely, lacks that. There are a few people whom the public considers food critics. But their voices aren’t that loud, and if they do raise them, the question is how far the public can accept it. The fact that Naver power bloggers claimed that market first may be one reason food criticism never took root here. Fundamentally, I suspect it’s because the voices the public wants, or that the mass media pursue, aren’t diverse enough in Korea. In France there are outlets with their own voices, like “Le Figaro” and “Le Monde,” and in the English-speaking world “The Guardian” and “The New York Times,” and within them critics of various leanings can emerge to write each column.

C And those outlets have authority. In Korea, the media have given up that authority themselves, by handing the job to reporters with no experience at all, or by publishing articles for money. Baekpa Hong Seongyu’s series in “Weekly Chosun” is close to what you could call the beginning of food criticism. Before that, Hong Seungmyeon, a former Dong-A Ilbo reporter, ran a serial of food columns in “Jubu Saenghwal” that were genuinely critical. But Baekpa’s writing was far more popular with the public. In truth, his writing was idle, poetic musing about nature, and he had almost no knowledge of food. Most of it was stories about drinking, but at the time that level of writing passed for criticism.

J Early in my time in this industry, I began writing restaurant reviews for a monthly magazine. Basically, a chef would sit down for drinks with the editor in chief and demand to know why the magazine was doing this to him.

C The restaurant criticism column that Chef Susumu Yonaguni wrote for the cooking magazine “Cooken” was also decent. He’s a chef who built his career in New York and introduced the latest Western cooking in Korea, and because he was a foreigner, he was relatively objective and sharp, and some of the content was good. Personally, I think it was the best food criticism in Korea at the time. But the existing fandoms of the restaurants couldn’t accept the criticism and protested fiercely, so the publication had a very hard time. It was an era when bloggers and individuals introduced and hyped particular restaurants according to personal connections. A climate where people react emotionally instead of reflecting on criticism and trying to improve is why food criticism never gained a foothold in Korea. It’s also tied to the Korean temperament, which generally doesn’t take criticism well. The fact that criticism has developed abroad also has to do with the level of readers. It’s hard when everything leans one way or when attention is concentrated only on what’s popular, as it is in Korea. Of course, Korea has a foundation for accepting criticism, but its impact is too weak to form a culture. And in an age when outlets like newspapers have lost their old influence, it’s become unclear through which channel criticism and reviews should even be done.

If you opened your own place in Italy, France or Belgium, what kind of food would you want to serve?

C Korean food, of course.

J I wouldn’t. (Laughs)

C Korean restaurants abroad often cater to Koreans living there, but the number of Korean restaurants aimed at locals is growing. Authentic Korean food is possible, but I think it’s better to pick up on what locals will like and work from there. In that respect, wouldn’t we have a bit more of a feel for it than others?

J I’d do Korean food too. If you’re going to run a business, you should serve something that came across the water. (Laughs) Korean food abroad, and Western food in Korea. We’re drawn to outward elements more than to the essence, after all. People pay 20,000 won for pasta in Korea precisely because it’s in Korea, right? But the field where I personally find enjoyment is Western food.

Is there a particular reason?

J I hate know-it-alls by nature, and if you do Korean food, there are far too many people who offer unsolicited advice. If you do Western food, nobody does. (Laughs) Honestly, my cooking is nothing special, but if I say I lived in Belgium for seven or eight years and in Paris for one, and that I’ve appeared on “Please Take Care of My Refrigerator” and on Olive TV, people don’t say a word. So doing Western food feels much freer and more fun than Korean food.

Let’s talk about travel and food. When you travel, do you have your own criteria or know-how for choosing a restaurant?

J I think of the first day of a trip as a throwaway day, so I just eat something quick. Instead, I wander around and get a feel for the alleys and the shops. In Korea or abroad, I tend to trust restaurants full of middle-aged and older people dressed comfortably, like locals.

C The kind of place I like is one where you feel psychologically at ease. Rather than somewhere expensive and pretentious, I like a place that’s cheap, comfortable and reasonably good, where ordinary people eat. That’s what I’d call a true local favorite. In Japan they say you can tell just by looking at the noren curtain. It’s the same in Korea.

J The two of us went on work trips to Iceland and Hong Kong together, and your standard was very clear.

C There’s a certain feeling I like. A place that sacrifices something to keep prices low. A little grubby, and in Hong Kong, maybe a man in an undershirt sitting at the next table. I’m not necessarily looking for a delicious restaurant. I’m looking for one that satisfies me emotionally. If a place like that also happens to be delicious, it’s perfect.

J When you go to places like that, a happy smile comes over your face all on its own.

Of all the dishes you’ve tried, which one left the biggest impression? Or is there a travel moment connected to food?

J Every dish leaves an impression. It’s always something new, and I always learn something. One unusual dish I remember is cuy, which I ate in Cusco, Peru. It’s guinea pig.

C Wherever I go, my eyes go first to the cooks, and the cooks in Hong Kong especially stayed with me. Hong Kong has a huge gap between rich and poor, right? If you go into an ordinary restaurant, the tableware and cooking tools are shabby. Once I went to a place selling cheap Chinese lunch boxes. Most orders were takeout, so the inside was extremely cramped. In that tiny kitchen, filled with the heat of the ovens, I was shocked to see eight cooks in undershirts come out. When I first went to Hong Kong, I asked one cook, and he said he got one day off a month. European cooks used to work like that too, but only those who were trying to learn haute cuisine. Hong Kong cooks, though, aren’t making a voluntary choice for the sake of success. They’re doing it to make a living. The dark expressions worn down by labor, the tired faces… As a fellow cook, it breaks my heart to think that there are people who work like that. It isn’t pity. I’m amazed by their endurance. Their lean muscles and their cooking don’t look ordinary to me. You could say I’m amazed by the strength of a craftsman.

Do you have a personal ritual related to food when you travel?

J When I come home from a trip, I always buy the local alcohol of that country. If I have room, one bottle of wine to drink and one bottle of spirits for display.

C I like beer, so I try the local beer. When I drink a well-kept beer, I feel wonderful. Places like that usually have good food, too. People often say Japanese draft beer is delicious, but after reporting trips, I found it varies a lot even in Japan. When someone asks me where to get good draft beer in Japan, I recommend the cafés in the airport departure hall. The turnover is very fast and the hygiene is meticulous, so it can’t taste bad. The downsides? It’s expensive, and it mostly comes in plastic cups. The other place is the department store. They keep things very clean there, too.

J Come to think of it, you can find good food in airports if you look. The draft beer at Japanese airports and the salmon at Helsinki Airport were really good. We ate it together! The gin-cured salmon.

C Just because a place is the home of salmon doesn’t mean everything there is delicious, but the salmon at that place was truly delicious. The fish itself was top quality, and the curing was perfect. Ah, I want to eat it again!

Chef Park Junwoo, you go to Mongro often. What do you like best there?

J The draft beer. (Laughs)

C We keep our draft beer perfectly!

And the food?

J Honestly, what I like most is Mongro’s draft beer with kimchi as a snack, or Mongro’s draft beer with bottarga (dried fish roe) as a snack. But as for a dish, I especially remember when Mongro first launched the Quaranta pasta and the fried skate, and he gave them to me, saying, “Try this.” I think it’s because it’s a special memory tied to that space. With food experiences, emotion and feeling matter too.

Could you recommend any works about travel and food?

C If you’re traveling in China, you should read “The Table of Confucius.” It explains Chinese food culture very well. In the film “Eat Drink Man Woman,” Huaiyang cuisine appears, and it shows just how varied Chinese cooking is. For Japan, “Osaka Gladly Drinks Standing Up.” (Laughs)

J Personally, the book I reread every time I travel is “Larousse Encyclopedia Of Wine.” It explains the world’s wine regions and types of wine, and if I skim it before a trip, I find I’m a little more curious once I get there.

One last question. Suppose Chef Park Junwoo plans the entire itinerary himself and gets to travel with Chef Park Chanil. Where would you want to go?

J I wouldn’t go.

C Neither would I.

C · J (Laughing at the same time)

J I think it would be fun to go together, but where would be good? Ah, somewhere like a Southeast Asian resort would be nice. That way you could put down the stress and tension you get from being a chef and writer in Korea, and refresh yourself.

C Let’s go to Myanmar or Laos. They’re less developed even within Southeast Asia, which is why I like them.

And Chef Park Chanil?

C Hmm, among the places I know well… Palermo! I’d take him to Palermo. Drink all the Sicilian wine we want, and eat street food, market food, all the dishes sold with a heavy markup. Sicily’s desserts are fantastic, too. The Arab-style desserts. Marzipan all came from there.

J Yes, he says we should go to Palermo. (Laughs)