A conversation on differentiation strategies drawn from experience
Park Se-yeong's Geumdwaeji Sikdang is, by any measure, one of the gogijip most sought after by international visitors in Seoul. Even so, Park refuses to coast on that established brand — he keeps chasing better ingredients, developing new dishes, and looking for what can set the restaurant apart, and he brought those thoughts to the nanrohoe. Chef Ok Dong Sik of the eponymous Ok Dong Sik, whose clear pork gomtang built his name at home, is now running a pop-up in New York — and has been at the forefront of expanding what can be done with pork. Before Ok Dong Sik, clear-broth gomtang was almost always made with beef, while pork broth dishes tended to lean on heavy spice work. The clean, quietly inventive twist of a clear pork broth became one of the more absorbing threads of the day's discussion.
Small shifts in perspective open Hansik up further
The need to diversify menus — something we had taken for granted — naturally became the day's central thread. Chef Kim Ho-yoon, who runs Italian Club, drew on his time running a premium gogijip earlier in his career to speak to what Korean beef grilling looks like when framed through a Western-cooking lens. Voices came from a Michelin-starred fine-dining kitchen, from a more everyday restaurant simmering a single bowl of meat broth, and from restaurants working in Western food — a wide sweep of grilling experiences, all circling back to the same point: how much difference one further step, one shift in perspective, can make.
Professor Lee Kyu-jin of Kyungnam University, who has long studied and documented shifts in Hansik around grilling culture, made the case that these ongoing changes must be captured continuously, so the next generation of chefs coming up in the industry have material to study. Vice President Song Gil-young of ByBrand Company (Bhib Company) proposed the same for archival practice more broadly, and shared his own thinking on how such records could be kept and circulated with real value.
