Korean Tasting Menu Restaurant Ki Is LA’s Most Exciting New Restaurant | Eater LA
"Opened January 16 in the basement of a Little Tokyo office building (check in at the host stand for Kaneyoshi and Bar Sawa), this modern Korean counter serves a multi-course tasting priced at $285 per person (wine pairing $190) and seats along a long, wide counter for up to 12 diners though most nights accommodate eight, with a single 6:30 p.m. seating Wednesday–Sunday; reservations are available on Tock. The menu "weaves through a deeply personal narrative while exploring various facets of Korean ingredients, cooking techniques, and flavors," and the prevailing themes, as the chef often uses, are "comfort and elegance." The service is intimate and theatrical: during dinner the chefs zig-zag around the counter, dusting plates of grilled lobster slices over doenjang butter sauce with raspberry powder or slicing a rosemary-roasted Colorado lamb saddle into bite-sized pieces, while co-chefs Ryan Brown and Shingo Kato bring their own culinary firepower to the experience. Dishes shown include steamed sea perch with scarlet prawn, dry-aged dairy cow with roasted sesame, creamy perilla noodles topped with shaved winter truffles, and charcoal-grilled lobster tail with doenjang sauce and raspberry powder, with savory courses culminating in a lamb saddle carved tableside and served with smoked tomato-stuffed morels. The snack sequence preserves highly specific technical and textural touches: an "alien-like orb of cod milt (also called shirako) tinted with a pale red-orange kimchi sauce atop a tiny ball of rice and a cylinder of crispy bugak seaweed" — inspired by the chef's love of gimbap: "While cod milt is typical in haemul-tang [seafood stew], I wanted to capture the harmonious flavors of rice and banchan, where you make your own combination with every bite," he says — with the milt available only in winter and switched out in spring; delicate horse mackerel slices wrapped around aged baek-kimchi (kimchi without any gochugaru) and perilla leaf; and the chef's now-signature crispy octopus with a rich octopus head sauce. The grilled lettuce (sangchu) ice cream was conceived by charring, dehydrating, and then infusing an ice cream base; the chungju cream, which uses the unfiltered rice beverage, adds a slightly sweet contrast to the earthy quenelle of lettuce ice cream, and the dish is finished with a dollop of Astrea caviar (preferred because it’s sourced from older sturgeons and "has less 'pop' in the texture but a richer umami finish"). On caviar the chef is forthright: "It took me several years to realize that caviar is actually good," said Kim. "When I had a caviar dish served with asparagus ice cream at Aska in New York, it was a shocking thing, and caviar with ice cream got stuck in my head," he says. The program leans seasonally and kaiseki-adjacent: "Morels are typically served in spring, and the 'next season' approach is like Japanese kaiseki 'hashiri,' which means embracing what's coming," says the chef. He has also been candid about his mental-health journey after the closure of his prior restaurant and says therapy helped; serving lamb here represents a kind of triumph and an acknowledgement of progress. The chef's résumé (chef de cuisine at Meteora while it earned its first Michelin star; founder of the previous tasting menu Kinn, which drew praise from Los Angeles Times critic Bill Addison) helps explain the maturity on display and the ambition to sit alongside renowned counters such as Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, Atomix, and Catbird Seat while contributing its own distinctive chapter to Los Angeles's fine-dining Korean scene." - Matthew Kang
