'Every time I eat my own food, I suffer' — the creative philosophy of chef Kim Jin-hyuk

We see the world through food. Welcome to "Midam," stories worth savoring. The day humans first picked up fire, the first chef was born. For more than a million years, they have woven culture into cuisine. These are the stories of chefs — the oldest artists in pursuit of the finest flavors.

An interview with Kim Jin-hyuk, chef of Alla Prima

Filling the gaps of creation through forgetting

Chef Kim Jin-hyuk of Alla Prima. (Chae Sang-woo)

"Not once — not a single time — have I eaten something I made without feeling tormented."

Chef Kim Jin-hyuk's self-assessment is self-deprecating and bleak. It goes beyond harsh into something almost brutal. In those words, I read his love-hate relationship with cooking and the anguish it carries.

His sense of satisfaction resembles a voyage in search of the edge of the universe — an ideal that, like an ever-expanding cosmos, keeps receding no matter how far he travels toward it.

The culinary world regards him as an artist consumed by creation. One encounter with his spontaneous, form-defying dishes is enough to understand immediately why he has earned that reputation.

A dish by chef Kim Jin-hyuk. (Alla Prima)

His life as a chef calls to mind Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Irish novelist James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" — a young man who agonizes within the constraints of religion and society, and ultimately breaks free on the wings of imagination. That escape is, in essence, the liberation of the self.

Kim, too, refused to stay within the boundaries of any fixed genre. He began his career at Tomoe, a robatayaki restaurant in Cheongdam-dong, then traveled to Japan to study authentic Japanese cuisine. He trained at izakaya and ramen shops in Tokyo, but his thirst for something new never quite went away.

Searching for answers, he enrolled at Hattori Nutrition College, where he encountered the legendary Ferran Adrià — widely hailed as a revolutionary of modern cuisine. That meeting changed the course of Kim's culinary life entirely.

"Meeting Ferran Adrià at school completely upended my understanding of cooking," Kim said. "His transformed, deconstructed creative cuisine was nothing like the French or Italian food I knew. It was a genuine shock."

Back in Korea, he joined SPC Group in 2008 to work on brand development. Through one project, he met Yonemura Masayasu, a master of creative cuisine in Kyoto. Where Adrià was avant-garde, Yonemura's cooking was direct and linear — and it gave Kim an entirely different kind of inspiration.

In 2015, Kim opened Alla Prima and began presenting his own creative cuisine to the world in earnest. He introduced new dishes virtually every day — a pace that left fellow chefs, who knew just how difficult it is to create something genuinely new, stunned.

"When I started Alla Prima, I wanted to cook things that had never existed before," he said. "In the beginning, I was changing the menu almost daily, putting out a large number of new dishes. There was just so much I wanted to try."

The culinary world took notice immediately. Alla Prima earned a Michelin one star in 2017, the first year the Michelin Guide Seoul was published, then climbed to two stars in 2019 — a distinction it has held ever since, achieved just four years after opening. The restaurant also ranked 61st on the Asia's 50 Best Restaurants 2025 list, a recognition that continues to grow.

Forget cooking — and the ideas will come

Chef Kim Jin-hyuk of Alla Prima. (Alla Prima)

Kim's cooking is a perfect demonstration of how two seemingly incompatible concepts — avant-garde and minimalism — can coexist. His dishes are at times spontaneous, governed by chance. They are instinctive and direct. Innovation unconstrained by form or genre has become the phrase that best describes his work.

What makes him particularly interesting is that he actively tries to distance himself from cooking in order to find creative inspiration — much like how the harder you try to forget something, the more vividly it surfaces. The moment he attempts to shake off cooking is, paradoxically, the moment he is most deeply in its grip. New dishes emerge from precisely that space where rumination and forgetting intersect.

"I deliberately immerse myself in things completely unrelated to cooking for a month or two at a time," he said. "It might be films, painting or video games. I focus on something else to get cooking off my mind — and strangely, that's when the best ideas come."

When it comes to flavor, Kim has one clear, overriding priority: aroma. Taste, he believes, is not experienced through the tongue alone — without scent, a dish is never truly complete. To that he adds restraint: minimal ingredients and a deliberate holding back of technique. He prefers an intuitive flavor structure over elaborate complexity, and through variations of intuitive taste and aroma, he pursues what he considers the ultimate ideal of fine dining — the lingering finish.

"Flavor is something I take extremely seriously," he said. "When you enjoy a dish, the first sense engaged is sight, and the second is aroma. Then comes taste on the tongue, followed by texture as you chew, the sensation of swallowing, and finally the finish — that's how a dish becomes complete. I love the aromas of cucumber, melon, shiso and cilantro. I know they're divisive ingredients, but they're not something I'm willing to compromise on. They play a genuinely important role in my cooking. That's also why I love spring ingredients — the wild mountain greens that come out in March and April carry this vivid, green fragrance. Among fish, I'm particularly fond of sweetfish, because of their distinctive watermelon-like scent."

The style of creative cuisine Kim practices carries a high barrier to entry even within fine dining — widely regarded, in truth, as the preserve of dedicated food enthusiasts. Yet Kim hopes more people will venture into that unfamiliar territory.

"I don't think creative cuisine is something grand or intimidating," he said. "Ultimately, it's simply food that tastes good — people just don't know it yet. As you accumulate experience, you'll develop a frame of reference for flavors that once seemed puzzling. And at some point, you'll find yourself genuinely enjoying them."

Kim's cooking always moves toward an ideal that remains unfinished. That is why, he says, eating his own food is always a source of torment. Satisfaction is perpetually one plate away. But it is precisely that endless sense of lack that drives a creator forward.

Just as aroma lingers long after the last bite, his cooking reaches not toward the moment of completion but toward the next possibility. What Kim creates may be less the food on a plate than a journey toward an ideal he knows he will never fully reach.

"Not once — not a single time — have I eaten something I made without feeling tormented."

A creator is not someone who arrives at completion. A creator is someone who sets out again, knowing full well that completion will always remain just out of reach. Perhaps that very torment is what drives Kim Jin-hyuk to make something new each day.