Gyenari
Photo: courtesy of the restaurant
There are two menus available at Culver City Korean Gyenari, one titled "Old World," the other "New World." And yet, there's a good deal of overlap between the two, both of which were created by Next Food Network Star finalist Debbie Lee (who's finished up her tenure as consulting chef at the restaurant). Her "Seoulful Suppers" include both classic galbee (beef short rib) and galbee pot pie with ginger soy gravy. We chatted with Lee to learn about her unique perspective on Korean cuisine, which comes from, well, not having eaten it as a child.
Merrill Shindler: You have a Western twang to your speech. Is that a Southwestern Korean accent?
Debbie Lee: I grew up in the American Southwest, in Arizona. I didn't grow up eating Korean food. I grew up with the cooking of the South. When my parents came here from Korea, they settled in the Deep South. So what my mother cooked was soul food – fried chicken, grits and gravy, black-eyed peas. I come from a Korean family that didn't eat Korean food.
MS: How did you discover your culinary heritage?
DL: I had my first taste of kimchee when I was six years old. We came to LA and stayed with my grandparents. There was a family gathering, and my grandmother forced me to eat kimchee. My reaction was, "What is this? It's interesting." I started to like it. I guess it was in my DNA.
MS: So, if it weren't for your grandmother, you might be cooking nouvelle Cajun instead of nouvelle Korean?
DL: It was my grandmother who introduced me to the wonders of Korean food. She doesn't speak any English – I don't speak any Korean. But we communicated through food. She would cook from 5:45 in the morning till 11 at night. I'd stay in the kitchen with her, hours in the kitchen. We used sign language. Which is how I learned to make kimchee, and everything else.
MS: Did you love it from the first day?
DL: Not really. I didn't like everything. At first with mandoo, the Korean dumplings, I wouldn't eat them because everything was so mushed up with onions inside the dumpling. I'd only eat the won ton skin, not the filling.
MS: Before your grandmother took you under her wing, did you have any interest in cooking?
DL: Even in Arizona, my life was built around food. When I was five years old, I went to a bookstore. And the book I picked out was a cookbook. The next weekend, I made my parents stay in bed. And I made them breakfast from that book. The kitchen was a mess. But I was learning to cook.
MS: And where did cooking take you?
DL: I worked as a caterer for five years. I consulted at The Counter – I went with the owner to every burger place in LA to see what was being done right. We came up with a great burger. Not a Korean burger, an American burger.
MS: And you brought a breath of fresh air to the Next Food Network Star competition.
DL: Honestly, I entered on a fluke. I had stopped cooking. A friend who had a PR company needed some demos done for a client, and she put me on the KTLA Morning News. It was great. The next week there was an audition for Next Food Network Star – thousands of people showed up. I made the cut, and wound up as one of the final three. For me, that was a huge win.
MS: And it got you back into the cooking game. Gyenari was exactly the right restaurant, at exactly the right time.
DL: Gyenari is a flower that blooms just once a year. A long-lost cousin, William Shin, opened it with Danny Kim and Robert Benson. I didn't know a relative was behind it when I showed up. And I realized it was my little cousin, Will. I guess all Koreans really are related.
MS: And what was the concept? You have a huge Korean community to draw from – but Culver City is far from K-town, so the cooking has to appeal to Anglos as well.
DL: The idea was not to do a generic Korean restaurant. We decided to do cooking with classic integrity, but with a modern twist. I wanted to pay tribute to my grandmother, to go back to the old world, and bring it to the new world. You can eat the simple meal of a peasant, or the 12-course feast of a king or queen. It's also how people are eating these days in Korea – nouvelle Korean is all the rage. So we get lots of people from Koreatown. Gyenari lives in several different worlds. And they're making some wild cocktails in the bar. It's all so LA.
– Merrill Shindler