고궁 — 조선왕조 궁중요리의 현대적 해석
This restaurant began as an archive. Chef Park Min-jae spent four years in the kitchens of Jongmyo Jerye scholars and Joseon-era recipe historians before opening the doors at 412 N. Beverly. The result is not nostalgic. It is, instead, an attempt to read the recipes of the court as one reads a manuscript — closely, slowly, with the assumption that every gesture once had a reason.
The catalog you are now holding documents the current season. Each plate is numbered, captioned, and presented in the manner of an exhibition entry. Read them in order, or do not. The room itself prefers the former.
Chef Park trained first at the kitchens of the Korea House in Jung-gu, where he spent eleven years under the late Master Han Bok-rye — one of the last living practitioners of the Joseon palace canon. He arrived in Los Angeles in 2018 with a single notebook, the contents of which he has been translating, plate by plate, ever since.
"There is a temptation, when reading a four-hundred-year-old recipe, to make it modern. To improve it. I have tried, instead, to listen for what the cook in 1647 already knew. The court understood balance long before we did. My only job is not to interrupt."
"A dining room is a kind of frame. The food inside it should be allowed to be old, if it is old. We do not paint over the lacquer at the National Museum, and we do not modernize jeotgal here."
Four principal plates form the spine of the meal. Each is preceded by a small course of banchan, drawn from the season, and followed by a tea or rice closing in the Joseon manner.
The dining room was built in collaboration with the Seoul-based restoration carpentry studio of Master Kim Tae-yeong. The lacquered cedar ceiling required eleven coats of ottchil; the screens were salvaged from a 1920s Bukchon residence and rebuilt at scale. The room intends to feel both private and ceremonious — the dimensions, roughly, of a scholar's reading hall.
Lighting throughout is by candle and shielded brass. Music is provided sparingly — a recorded gayageum programme, four hours in length, repeats nightly.
412 North Beverly Drive
Beverly Hills, California
Wednesday — Saturday
seatings at 5:30, 6:00 and 8:30
By reservation only.
Bookings are accepted thirty days in advance.
The room is candle-lit and formal in feeling.
Jackets are appreciated, never required.