On an early episode of Netflix’s hit cooking show “Culinary Class Wars,” the chef Anh Sung-jae stood in a warehouse filled with makeshift cooking stations and considered the plate in front of him: a rainbow palette of handmade pastas, purées and delicately cooked seafood. On top was a smattering of flower petals.
Mr. Anh, a judge on the show, praised how the contestant had put together an elaborate dish and handled everything perfectly — almost.
“I don’t know why you chose to put flowers on top of such a gorgeous pasta,” he said to a crestfallen contestant.
“I hate putting useless stuff on dishes just to make them look prettier,” he said later. “What he did was add something that had no flavor and no use.”
Mr. Anh is the chef and owner of Mosu, South Korea’s only three-star Michelin restaurant, where his exacting and uncompromising standards have served him well. Yet, despite reaching the pinnacle of the culinary world, Mr. Anh was not a household name in the country. When he was introduced as a judge, a handful of contestants whispered to each other: “Who’s that?”
That’s no longer the case. He has risen to TV fame as a hard-to-impress and ruthlessly unsentimental judge on the popular cooking competition, which features 100 contestants from all corners of the culinary world. “Culinary Class Wars” feels like “Iron Chef” meets “Survivor.” It manufactures a class struggle, pitting renowned chefs against undiscovered talents like a school cafeteria cook.
But the breakout star was Mr. Anh, 42, and now he is everywhere. He had a prime-time interview on one of the country’s most prominent news programs. He starred in commercials for Subway sandwiches. And in a nod to his growing celebrity, he was lampooned in a sketch on South Korea’s version of “Saturday Night Live” — capturing his form-fitting, plum-colored suit and his tendency to sprinkle English into his Korean sentences.
“He is probably the most influential chef in Korea,” said Joseph Lidgerwood, the chef of EVETT in Seoul, a one-star Michelin restaurant, and a contestant on the show.
It has been a remarkable homecoming for Mr. Anh, who emigrated with his family to America as a teenager almost three decades ago. He has taken an improbable and difficult path to success, fighting in Iraq as a U.S. Army soldier and working as a dishwasher to pay for culinary school before finding his way to some of the best kitchens in America.
But the ultimate realization of his American dream took place in his native country, which transformed in the years he was away. South Korea is now a global cultural force in music, art, television and food.
I first spoke to Mr. Anh about two years ago after I took my wife to Mosu for her birthday. The experience was breathtaking. Everything was thoughtful and precise, but it didn’t feel overwrought or cold like some other top-line restaurants.
Instead of bread, we got sourdough ice cream with olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette. I still think about the tarte Tatin made from burdock root, a humble vegetable rarely featured in a dessert-like dish.
But it was his resolute views on food that fascinated me. In our first conversation, I asked him if people might think he’s not meeting the traditional definition of Korean food. He brusquely dismissed that notion with a pungent epithet.
Korean food has changed over time, Mr. Anh said, so there is no real definition of traditional. His food, he argued, is just another evolution of the cuisine. He added that with the exception of truffles and caviar, 95 percent of his ingredients came from Korea.
“Doesn’t that make it Korean?” he said.
Mr. Anh moved with his family to the United States when he was 13, settling in Southern California. He helped at his parents’ Chinese restaurant, but he didn’t have much interest in the kitchen. Instead of going to college, he enlisted in the Army after high school with dreams of traveling the world.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he asked to be sent to Iraq. Mr. Anh was stationed in Baghdad, where he fueled helicopters and tanks.
While in Iraq, he ate M.R.E.s, the ready-made meals that the military feeds to troops. He said everything tasted the same but that he didn’t care at the time because he was always hungry. The sameness of the food, he said, was most apparent after going to the bathroom because “it always smelled the same.”
When it came time to sign up for another tour of duty, Mr. Anh decided to do something else. He put down a deposit at a training program to become a mechanic for Porsches. But one day, he said, after a group of culinary school students walked by in white chef coats, he finally considered cooking as a profession and enrolled in culinary school.
After graduating, he worked at Urasawa, a Japanese restaurant in Beverly Hills, Calif., frequented by celebrities and once known for serving America’s most expensive sushi and kaiseki-style omakase dinner. They let him wash dishes after he offered to work for free.
Within a month, he said, he was working closely with the chef and owner, Hiroyuki Urasawa, a gruff and demanding boss whom Mr. Anh jokingly called “ill tempered.”
He learned a lot about Japanese cuisine. But he struggled with the feeling that when customers saw him behind the counter — with his head shaved and in a traditional kimono-style jacket — they would assume he was Japanese, not Korean.
“That bothered me a lot,” he said. “It felt like I was pretending to be someone else.”
In 2008, a customer spoke to him in Korean. His name was Corey Lee, and he was a young Korean American chef leading the kitchen at French Laundry, a Napa Valley restaurant considered a shrine to high-end establishments. Mr. Anh said Mr. Urasawa had asked Mr. Lee to hire his young protégé.
“There were very few Korean chefs working in fine dining at the time,” said Mr. Lee, who like Mr. Anh moved from South Korea to the United States as a child. “So when I met a young, ambitious Korean chef starting out in their career, I felt obligated to help him.”
Mr. Anh worked at French Laundry and eventually left to be a chef at Benu, which Mr. Lee had started in San Francisco. Both establishments are three-star fixtures in the Michelin guide.
In 2016, Mr. Anh opened his first restaurant in San Francisco called Mosu, a play on the Korean pronunciation of cosmos, a flower that grew in a field near his childhood home in South Korea. Mosu offered a tasting menu for $195, a record high for a new restaurant in the city.
In a column for The San Francisco Chronicle, the restaurant critic Michael Bauer said he was shocked at the “audacity of the pricing out of the gate” considering that “chef-owner Sung Anh doesn’t have much name recognition.”
Despite the inauspicious start, Mosu was awarded one Michelin star, an impressive achievement for a new restaurant, and the reservation book at the 18-seat hideaway was consistently full. But Amy In, Mr. Anh’s wife, said this was a challenging time.
“He was so stressed,” she recalled. “It was difficult to watch.”
After a year, Mr. Anh closed the restaurant to move back to South Korea.
“People called me crazy,” he said.
His timing was good. Michelin had started publishing its restaurant guide in South Korea, and there was a surge of interest in Korean food and culture.
When Mr. Anh opened Mosu in Seoul in 2017, he raised eyebrows by charging 240,000 Korean won (around $210 at the time) per person for the tasting menu, topping the city’s previously most expensive multicourse meal by 30 percent.
His investors told him that he was charging too much. Even his wife said she had wondered whether Koreans would pay that much for a meal.
Mr. Anh wasn’t having it. “This is not too expensive,” he explained. “This is the value I set.”
Mosu was initially more of a critical success than a commercial one. It earned its first Michelin star in the 2019 guide, added a second star the next year and finally became a three-star restaurant in 2023 — and remained the lone restaurant in the 2024 guide with that distinction.
Mr. Lidgerwood, the chef at EVETT and a friend of Mr. Anh’s, said the restaurant was not full in the early years. But Mr. Anh never compromised his standards — refusing, for example, to accept same-day reservations. He said he remembered worrying that Mosu would not make it.
“It was always a three-star restaurant. It just took time for Michelin to get there,” Mr. Lidgerwood said. “For me, it’s the gold standard of restaurants in Seoul.”
After Mosu received the third star, the reservation system broke down, overwhelmed with people trying to get a table.
This past January, Mr. Anh suddenly announced that Mosu was temporarily closing in Seoul. (It’s reopening date is still uncertain; as recently as this week, the restaurant’s website stated: “Thank you for visiting the Mosu Seoul website. We look forward to open our door again later this year.”)
In an interview with the newspaper Chosun Daily, Mr. Anh said he had split from CJ Group, a South Korean conglomerate that had invested in Mosu.
“I’m currently working on a new restaurant with a different partner, not a large corporation, that better matches my vision,” he said. The new restaurant is expected to reopen early next year in a new location.
But as one door closed, another one opened.
When Kim Hak-min and Kim Eun-ji, producers at Studio Slam, a company making “Culinary Class Wars” for Netflix, started interviewing potential judges, they had only one “irreplaceable” pick. It was not Mr. Anh.
They wanted Paik Jong-won, South Korea’s biggest celebrity chef. Revered for making unfussy food with mass appeal, the affable Mr. Paik oversees a restaurant empire with more than two dozen restaurant franchise brands — Paik’s Coffee, Paik’s Beer and Paik Boy Pizza, to name a few.
When Mr. Paik agreed, the producers met with Mr. Anh. He wasn’t an obvious fit. He didn’t have television experience, and some people on the production team didn’t know who he was. They were concerned that the contestants, many of whom were established chefs, might disregard his judgment.
“But he said: ‘If I became a judge, I don’t think you would hear any ifs, ands or buts. Everyone would accept my judgment,’” Kim Eun-ji recalled Mr. Anh saying. “We were mesmerized by his confidence.”
During the discussions with the producers, Mr. Anh had one stipulation: He didn’t want the contestants to be ridiculed for entertainment.
Respect matters a lot to Mr. Anh, a lesson I learned the hard way.
For this article, Mr. Anh spoke to me at length dating back to December 2022. I asked about his background and how his culinary experience contributed to his identity as a chef and a man. As a Japanese person who grew up mostly in America, I understood how it felt to be of two places and no place at the same time.
I was excited to do a story, but there always seemed to be another one more pressing. This is not uncommon in journalism, but a poor excuse nonetheless. When I checked back in with him about a year later, he was gracious and introduced me to his wife, his mentor and some of his friends from the Army.
And again, I let other stories take priority.
I knew he was probably offended. I hadn’t told his story, and I hadn’t explained why. In my mind, I was waiting for the right moment, but weeks turned into months, and with each passing day, I found it harder to go back to him.
So when I saw his face on Netflix, I felt torn. I was happy for him, and I knew this was the time to write about him. After a few messages, he finally responded.
“I have spent enough time and shared my story with you. I was hoping you would get back to me whether the story came out or not out of mutual respect,” he wrote. “You don’t have to write about me. I am not interested.”
My apologies did not sway him. After explaining that I still planned to proceed with an article and wanted to check a few details, he said: “Write whatever you want, I am not interested. Do not message anymore.”
I understood. I let things drag on when he wasn’t as big of a deal, and I was coming back now that he was the star of a hit show.
“Culinary Class Wars” was Netflix’s top-ranked non-English show for three straight weeks, and it appeared in the top 10 for six straight weeks. Netflix said the show was coming back for a second season, although, it said, Mr. Anh has not yet agreed to return as a judge.
Mr. Anh’s sense of responsibility and pride was apparent in his judging. He asked the contestants a lot of questions about what they had made, sometimes taking 10 minutes to consider a dish, according to Mr. Lidgerwood.
But Mr. Anh was a tough judge. One contestant in an episode, an older woman with the vibe of an audience favorite, had prepared a meal of seaweed soup, oyster pancake and kimchi with oysters.
Mr. Anh praised the delicacy of her dishes, but he asked if she usually served them with rice. When she said yes, he said that the dishes were “a bit salty for my taste” and that she had made a mistake not serving rice.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Anh said. “You’re eliminated.”
The other chefs gasped in disbelief.
In an interview with Mr. Anh on his YouTube channel, his fellow judge Mr. Paik joked that the chef was too picky. Mr. Anh was unmoved.
“That dish needed rice,” he said. “A Korean meal without rice is like serving a hamburger without a bun.”
After a pause, Mr. Paik broke out into laughter and said: “Oof, you’re picky.”
The post He’s the Only 3-Michelin-Starred Chef in Seoul. Don’t Cross Him. appeared first on New York Times.
