The World's Best Restaurants · 2026
Seoul, Republic of Korea
Jungsik changed the terms on which contemporary Korean food could enter an international fine-dining conversation.
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Jungsik changed the terms on which contemporary Korean food could enter an international fine-dining conversation. Yim Jung-sik opened the Seoul restaurant in 2009 and built a language that starts with familiar forms—banchan, gimbap, bibimbap, rice and broth—then reconstructs them without erasing their Korean identity. The current 2026 menu continues that method across abalone, duck, Hanwoo, seaweed noodles and a carefully staged opening sequence. The restaurant's second location carried the idea abroad, but Seoul remains the source: a long-running kitchen where a once-provocative phrase, new Korean cuisine, has become a practical framework for a wider generation.
The restaurant established a repeatable way to transform recognisable Korean dishes and meal structures while preserving their flavour logic and cultural legibility.
Seoul remains an active laboratory rather than a heritage address, with a current menu that keeps the founding language in motion across new ingredients and sequences.
Its consequence is visible not only in a second restaurant but in the broader confidence with which contemporary Korean chefs now treat domestic forms as material for authorship.
The live Seoul menu and chef history are verified first party; three independent ownership groups document current identity and longer consequence. The assessment does not treat international expansion or recognition as a substitute for present plate quality and makes no claim of firsthand inspection.
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