Fusion can be a bad word to chefs. It’s not the combining of flavors across cultures that bothers them. Many do that. What troubles them is the implication of forcing things together. Combinations that work, chefs think, evolve from experience.
At the NYC restaurant Sono, chef Sechul Yang draws on his culinary training and life experience to produce a cuisine all his own. Sono means “I am” in Italian, and Yang’s restaurant is an expression of who he is. The Korean native who came to the U.S. to attend the Culinary Institute of America spent eight years at one of New York’s most acclaimed Italian restaurants, Maialino. As he rolled noodles, simmered sauces, and braised meats, he began to notice similarities with the food that, as a child, he helped his mother cook at her restaurant in Korea.
Travel 6,000 miles west from South Korea, and you’ll find another peninsula jutting into the sea at the same latitude. The similarities with Italy don’t end there. Food as love. A culture of hospitality. Fermentation. Noodles. Locality and seasonality. Family-style meals built for sharing. And, intense regional pride — people of Jeonju, Gyeongsang, or Pyongan can feel as strongly about their food as those of Tuscany, Campania, and Emilia-Romagna.
Perhaps the deepest culinary connection is a shared appreciation for slow food. For both Koreans and Italians, a key ingredient is time, which coaxes flavors otherwise unattainable. And there’s science behind the tradition.
Take Yang’s addition of Korean slow-braised oxtail to a Roman dish known for speed: cacio e pepe. From a seat at Sono’s chef’s counter, the dish appears to come together in seconds, as Sous Chef Melissa Shaffer folds ribbons of mafaldine pasta into a quick emulsion of pecorino, pasta water, and black pepper.
But the speed is an illusion. Pecorino, after all, is aged milk. It can take months, even years, for enzymes to break down milk proteins into amino acids, yielding a deep umami flavor in cheeses like pecorino.
Adding slow-cooked oxtail boosts the effect. The meat adds umami while its collagen breaks down into gelatin, coating the palate and amplifying the perception of flavor. The result: rather than an unwelcome intruder in a classic Roman dish, the oxtail feels like it always belonged.
The menu is full of these seamless inspirations.
As side dishes, contorni are to Italy as banchan are to Korea, and Yang’s treatment of yu choy draws on both traditions. First, he does as Italians do and chars the leafy greens. Next, as he would in Korea, he makes a quick kimchi of the charred yu choy, with garlic, spice, and sugar, replacing Korean fish sauce – aekjeot – with Italian – garum.
Gratitude as Hospitality
Beyond food itself, Korea and Italy share something even more fundamental to a restaurant: a view of gratitude as a relation to others, and hospitality as its expression.
At Sono, the effect is twofold. In the open kitchen — which extends along much of the dining room — there is an uncommon sense of serenity and grace. For the calm, Yang credits gratitude, which he likens to engine oil in a car. “It helps to control the heat that can happen between the people and the work, and make things go as they are supposed to without burning them all,” Yang said. “I am thankful for my team, always doing their best in the moment.”
And in the dining room, hospitality is an extension of gratitude itself. In Korea, eunhye describes grace received and the enduring pull to return it. In Italy, ricambiare means to return kindness with kindness. In both, the belief that we are indebted to one another produces a longing to experience others’ happiness as their own.
Hospitality, then, is gratitude made visible – a host’s way of honoring the gift of a guest’s presence and seeking to share in their happiness. At Sono, servers deliver food and wine with the anticipatory glimmer of a friend who had wrapped a carefully chosen gift, eager to see it opened.
Thanks to Yang and his team, opening it is joy. Ours and theirs.
