In 2022, no Korean-American restaurant drew more attention from the world's diners than Atomix.
At the 2022 World's 50 Best Restaurants ceremony, Atomix took home the Art of Hospitality award and landed at No. 33 in the world, carrying Korean food culture far beyond its home in New York. This is a look at how they won over diners around the globe.
The exploration of Korean food culture led by Park Jung-eun and Park Jung-hyun pushes past "flavor" and into "experience."
From the day Atomix opened in 2017, every dish has arrived with a menu card packed with the historical and social context behind it. The clue to their approach also lies in how they have partnered — from the beginning — with Korean writers, artists, and specialists to shape a restaurant that carries Korean culture in every detail.
Park Jung-eun describes service in three tiers. The first, the baseline, is convenience: simply making sure the guest is comfortable. The second is atmosphere — the kind of service that shifts and refreshes the air inside a room. The third, the one she chases, is service that leaves such a resonance after dinner that the guest carries it back to change someone else, or something in the world around them. She believes a person who has been inspired and moved will pass that inspiration on. That, she says, is the real meaning of hospitality — service that moves people through the dining experience.
Park Jung-eun also stresses the mutual respect and collaboration between service and kitchen. Many people still think first of the chef when they think of a restaurant, but it is the service team that carries the chef's creativity across the table to the guest. When the chef and the manager start from mutual respect, each restaurant's character comes through more clearly. And when the tangible — the food, the tableware — meets the intangible senses of service in the right balance, the experience the restaurant intends for that evening reaches its full expression.
A restaurant, in their belief, is a place where a new culture is met and learned.
Between Atomix, Atoboy, and Naro, Park Jung-hyun and Park Jung-eun run restaurants offering different registers of experience. That means meeting guests from a wide range of backgrounds. Whoever walks in, the team is prepared to answer whatever they might ask; when explaining Korean food, they use the actual Korean words people use at home in Korea, even when the pronunciation is difficult. Each restaurant, in their view, is a place that teaches Korean food culture as naturally as it serves it. Just as Japanese cuisine took its place in the global fine-dining world step by step over decades, they believe love for a cuisine ultimately rests on an understanding of its culture — which is why they put so much into this work.
Park Jung-hyun and Park Jung-eun say the ground for real change is laid when three things line up — what you do well, what the world wants, and what only you can do — and they keep shaping their restaurants into places that carry both the taste and the culture of Korean food.
