If you are lucky, there will be scallops on the menu at Sunn’s in Chinatown, hauled up from seabeds 120 feet deep. They’re a gift to the chef, Sunny Lee, from her father, a retired engineer who dives for fun into the cold waters off Gloucester, Mass., down where scallops dart along the sand with swift claps of their shells. He rakes them up by hand, then back on the boat shucks and freezes them, an ever-growing hoard — so many that his wife finally said, “You have to get rid of them before you dive for more.”
And here they are, in a dish of hwe (raw seafood), cut thick and plush, so each piece has density between the teeth before it surrenders. The plate looks unfussy, as if just tossed together, but there’s a color principle at work, the scallops showing pink among ruby hunks of fatty tuna, dark split cherries and frilly white cloud-ear mushrooms, crunchy and spongy at once, evoking the pleasures of jellyfish and cartilage.
For Ms. Lee, what makes this dish Korean is the emphasis on texture. It’s not sashimi, sheer and delicate. Chewiness — putting the jaw to work — is a goal.
Scallops aren’t always available. (Her father is not a delivery service.) But Ms. Lee makes the most of whatever she has on hand, in the narrow restaurant’s even narrower kitchen, appointed with little more than an oven, an induction burner, two rice cookers and a fridge under the counter.
Before opening Sunn’s in December, she honed her craft doing pop-ups, so she is used to scrounging. During the day, the empty dining room is commandeered for prep: a tub to wash lettuces at Table 2, an extra burner at Table 6. (Six tables is it, along with eight stools by the kitchen, cozy enough that you might accidentally elbow a neighbor.)
Ms. Lee initially called Sunn’s a wine bar, to temper diners’ expectations. (Her business partner, Grant Reynolds, runs Parcelle, a wine retailer with a bar two doors down.) The menu is brief and changeable, by necessity. Yet somehow there is a sense of abundance. Dak mandu (dumplings) are big and floppy, stuffed with crab, chicken and — the game changer — schmaltz, gorgeously oozy, giving them the warming-from-within unctuousness of xiao long bao.
Salad is a free-for-all of vegetables and fruit, long-ribbed radicchio and wheels of lotus root in winter giving way to wax beans and broken pods of sugar snap peas in spring, and now summer’s plenty of taut little Sungold tomatoes and Emerald Beaut plums, which cling to the tree past ripeness, staying sweet and crisp, refusing to soften. You’re meant to eat all this with your hands, “like nachos,” Ms. Lee said. I started with a fork, but soon saw her point: Fingers are better to chase down every drop of sesame jang, an earthy whip of tahini and tofu.
Ms. Lee grew up in New England, the daughter of a mother with Greek ancestry and a father who was born in South Korea but has lived in the United States since he was 8. Not all inheritances are given; she had to seek hers out. After studying French techniques in culinary school and cooking at modern American restaurants including Blue Hill and Estela, she took a post at Insa, a Korean spot in Brooklyn. There she rediscovered herself as a master of banchan, the small dishes served alongside rice to carry you through a Korean meal — not sides, orbiting around an entree, but a constellation that completes the table.
At Sunn’s, some banchan are preserved, some fresh, past mingling with present, pickled mushrooms next to peak-ripe corn in a buttery collapse of onions. Ms. Lee also mixes and matches traditions: The daily lineup (six for $25, extras $6 each) might include supremely tender leeks vinaigrette, Dijon present but one-upped by Chinese hot mustard; trembly acorn jelly, with its anchoring bitterness; the platonic ideal of a potato salad, with mayonnaise boosted by crème fraîche, for silkiness and tang; and eggplant in a dark crush of raisins and olives, a homage to caponata.
Note that the trace of smoke in the eggplant is sleight of hand, conjured by Turkish smoked chile flakes. Open flames are taboo at Sunn’s; the kitchen lacks a ventilation hood.
In some dishes, I wished for more dimension. All I remember about a bowl of naengmyeon (noodles in chilled broth) is a lovely shiver on a fierce summer day. Tteok, springy rice cakes, are chopped down from logs into chubby stubs to play the role of ziti, baked in a meld of tomatoes and gochujang — nonna meets ajumma — and sealed with stretchy stracciatella. This makes a dramatic entrance, bubbling in Pyrex. The first two bites were luscious and gooey; the third, ponderous; the fourth, my last.
To say a restaurant is a work in progress suggests a future finishing point. But one of the joys of Sunn’s is that it doesn’t cleave to a notion of what should be. I liked Ms. Lee’s meanderings on the theme of chewiness, extending to the menu’s lone dessert, a sesame-studded, coconut-rich mochi cake with a golden heap of konggaru, soybeans roasted and ground finer than sand, to be half-eaten, half-inhaled. There’s no hierarchy of dishes here, no set arc to a meal. You could eat only banchan and rice, and it would be enough.
The tight quarters give the restaurant a bit of a conspiratorial feel. Servers expertly shimmy past. Ms. Lee often runs dishes to tables herself. Water is poured out of wide-mouthed bottles branded with the Jinro Soju toad, a secret handshake for fellow Koreans.
And sometimes late into the night, a communal exuberance takes hold, as if we were all in it together, this magic act of eking out a beautiful, even bountiful dinner in an underequipped, hemmed-in, breathless squeeze of a space, buoyed by adrenaline, obstinacy and will — this magic act of living in New York.
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Ligaya Mishan is a chief restaurant critic for The Times.
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