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NAC: What are the five "must-have" ingredients in your kitchen?
LEE: Pretty basic ones; salt, pepper, olive oil, vinegar, and butter. Any dish starts with building the foundations of flavor. The building blocks of any dish are salt and pepper, then a fat, and then you can go on to the next stage, which is veggies, then the meat. But it all starts with the basics.
NAC: How is your palate influenced by the foods you ate as a child?
LEE: There's a memory of certain flavors that you experience when you're very young. Growing up with certain foods, you never lose the ability to taste them or be discerning about them. If you grow up eating pasta your entire life from a really young age, you have a certain sense about how pasta tastes, feels in mouth. I grew up eating Asian cuisines, and those are deeply embedded in my memory. My mother cooked almost every meal that we ate when I was a child. Simple things. She made breakfast, packed lunch, cooked dinner. I grew up eating my mother's cooking, almost exclusively.
In Asia, you have all different kinds of foods. There are different kinds of Asian cuisine with each culture; there's rustic, and there's refined. In most Asian cultures, they have a very strict hierarchy--a feudal society, with kings, queens, royalty—then, the other classes that are more rustic, eat things that are more simply prepared, foods that have a long shelf life.
NAC: What style (or nationality) of cuisine do you find to be the most challenging, and why?
LEE: For me it's Chinese cuisine. It really has to do with ingredient proximity and accessibility. I think for us as cooks who grew up in Western kitchens, China is difficult to understand because it's been closed off for such a long time. Chinese cuisine has the largest repertory of any other cuisine I can think of, in terms of ingredients. These days the ingredients are much more accessible, but Chinese cuisine still has ingredients that are only available in China. It's a very special, very vast cuisine. And the food you'd find in one part of China is very different from other parts.
NAC: What's the most difficult part about being a chef? The most rewarding?
LEE: The most difficult part is being able to balance life at home and life at work. I think chefs in general work very long hours, long days, many days a week. You have to balance what you do at work and what you do at home. The most rewarding is watching someone you work with develop as a cook. To watch someone come in as an extern at a young age, to watch progress happen as they work their way up in the kitchen, and to know that you shared in that progress.
NAC: What would consider to be the most important Korean dishes?
LEE: The thing about Korean food is you're not going to sit down and eat one thing. There are countless side dishes that go along with it. The basics of Korean cuisine are the side dishes, just an endless list of small dishes. Along with your main dish, you'd have a little side of pickles, little vegetable pancakes. The list goes on. Understanding why they cook like that is really a history lesson. It was a very poor country for a long time, with very cold winters, and it was about trying to preserve ingredients when they were ripe, and trying to make them last for months and months. That's how that it developed, this tradition of dishes that can be preserved.
Corey Lee 's Favorite Restaurants & Grocery Stores
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Restaurant |
Ino Sushi
22 Peace Plaza
Suite 510
San Francisco, CA 94115
415.922.3121
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