Hooni Kim may be the first Queens chef to win a James Beard Award. At his LIC restaurant, the fermentation master explains why New Yorkers should eat more fermented foods.
BY COLE SINANIAN
cole@queensledger.com
To Chef Hooni Kim, Long Island City is really two towns.
There’s the loud, crowded Court Square, full of dense skyscrapers and rental apartments, a younger-skewing population and a bar scene to match. The restaurants, too, reflect this demographic. Many are Instagram-ready foodie pilgrimages. Think the luxe, velvet and red neon extravagance of Red Sorghum, or the steaming Sichuan hotpots and robot waiters of Nai Brother.
But it’s an older, more family-oriented crowd closer to the water, in the low-rise Hunters Point neighborhood. Kim — who runs a Korean specialty food store called Little Banchan Shop and its adjoining restaurant/ “fermentation studio,” Meju, on 49th Ave — identifies a distinct dining scene on this side of the neighborhood. Personally, Kim is partial to Casa Enrique, which he says may very well be the best Mexican restaurant in Queens, and whose chef, Cosme Aguilar, he runs into often in the neighborhood.
“The restaurants are very different in Court Square,” Kim told the Queens Ledger in an interview at Meju this week. “You will get a lot of people, a lot of restaurants that are a lot more fancy and looking for a show, whereas here you find a lot more restaurants where it’s ingredient-focused, a lot more family friendly and less drinking.”
For Kim and his wife, who’ve lived in the same apartment across the street from Little Banchan Shop for the past 14 years, Hunters Point has provided an ideal backdrop to raise their son, offering the perfect balance of culture, quiet, and green space. But this more family-friendly, health-conscious atmosphere also happens to be the perfect place for Kim to explore his culinary obsession: Wild fermentation. Specifically, in the form of cold, fermented, savory Korean small plates known as Banchan. A style of dish that’s near-ubiquitous in Korea but hard-to-find stateside, Banchan utilizes wild fermentation to produce pungent and highly nutritious bites that stay fresh for weeks, and when eaten with a bowl of hot rice, could make for the workaholic New Yorker’s ideal weeknight meal.
“Who am I cooking for?” said Kim, who just won the 2026 James Beard Award for New York State’s best chef, making him quite possibly the first from Queens to do so.
“It was the moms who wanted to feed their children healthy ingredients. People get a lot more health conscious when they become a parent, and that’s how we work, my wife and I, and that’s just what I thought this neighborhood needed.”
Kim opened Little Banchan Shop across the street from his apartment back in 2022, while Meju — which seats just nine and is accessible only via a long, dimly lit hallway in the back of Little Banchan Shop — came later, opening in 2023.
Nowadays, Kim could talk for hours about the benefits of modern compared to wild fermentation — which relies on naturally arising probiotics to naturally select for the strongest microorganisms — or how fermented foods grew out of necessity in the ancient cultures of the mountainous and comparatively soil-poor Korean peninsula, where nutrition was derived from the concentrated healthy bacteria produced by the fermentation process. Or why his fermented sauces, for example — built from the dried beige block of fermented soybeans quintessential to Korean cuisine known as Meju, for which Kim’s restaurant is named — must be made in Korea, where “free radical probiotics” float through the air, the result of thousands of years of fermentation culture that simply cannot be replicated elsewhere.
But, although his roots are in Korea, Kim’s focus on traditional Korean foods came later. His culinary education is decisively New York, having grown up devouring fast food burgers and dollar slices as a child in Midtown Manhattan. After dropping out of medical school, he studied French and Japanese cooking at the French Culinary Institute in SoHo (now the International Culinary Center) and worked at hot Manhattan restaurants like Daniel and Masa.
Still, there remained a taste that eluded him. Kim talks of “Son-mat,” a Korean term that translates literally to “hand-taste,” and describes the unique touch of a specific cook, imparting an intangible quality to food that is often associated with mothers and grandmothers. Kim’s grandmother would cook for him when he’d visit her rural island home of Soan-do in the Namhae Sea as a kid each summer, but he struggled to appreciate it at the time. These were deeply funky, wild fermented dishes born from the Korean countryside — not easy on the palate of an American child. Kim recalls eating her doenjang-jjigae, or fermented soybean paste stew, for example, and grimacing.
“I hated going to Korea every summer,” Kim said.
But as his culinary career progressed and he began to study traditional Korean cooking, he found himself thinking about his grandmother’s doenjang more and more.
“I remembered the flavors of my grandmother’s cooking, and suddenly that food made me uncomfortable,” Kim said. “I was yearning for it.”
He now serves a version of his grandmother’s doenjang as his first course at Meju, whose tasting menu runs at $235 per person. It’s the result of years of striving to recreate that flavor he had only ever tasted in his grandmother’s home. Kim described the experience of tasting it for the first time as an adult as almost divine, a sign that he had finally come close to mastering the ancient art of Korean wild fermentation. Some older diners at Meju, Kim says, are so moved by these flavors otherwise only encountered in the homes of their parents and grandparents, that they break into tears upon first bite.
“I believe there’s what’s called taste memory,” Kim said. “You remember people, you remember situations, you remember the energy of that moment from the foods that you eat while you’re in that moment.”
