On a journey from Seoul to San Francisco and back again, Sung Anh tells stories of nostalgia with Korean recipes at Mosu in Korea’s capital and at Hong Kong’s M+ Museum
By way of America, South Korean chef Sung Anh’s cooking is modern on its surface. His three-Michelin star restaurant Mosu Seoul and local outpost Mosu Hong Kong is ornate and deliberate with its style.
Sung’s ancestry is complex, seeing swathes of North Korean, Chinese, and Japanese influence colour his family’s life on the Korean peninsula and the US, and the food stories he tells in the regional Mosu brand.
“Every culture has their own traditional recipes and the way of preparing food and gathering around as a family,” Sung tells Foodie over a video call. “When I talk about my influences [as a chef], I speak of my grandmother, who is from North Korea,”
Having lived previously in North Korea, Sung’s maternal grandparents fled their home after the country invaded South Korea in the summer of 1950. During their youth, the couple “were forced into a Japanese way of life” under Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945.
“Korean’s typically eat doenjang (miso) with their meals, they ate nattō (fermented soy beans). Their North Korean-ish, Japanese-ish meals affected how me and my family ate our food.” The mountainous North Korea lacks the great terroir and flat plains of South Korea. Meals are punctuated in the North with strong additions of buckwheat and root vegetables and less chillies due to the colder climate.
At 13 years old, Sung emigrated to the US to work at his family’s fast food Chinese restaurant in San Diego. After a four-year stint in the US Army, culinary school came next and a resume soon packed making any budding chef full of palpable envy.
Sung worked at the glitzy Urasawa sushi restaurant in Los Angeles, esteemed The French Laundry, and Michelin-starred restaurants in Benu and Aziza in San Francisco. In contradiction to his starred experience in America’s top kitchens, Sung is assertive that “no matter what kind of experience you gain as a chef, whether you flip burgers, cook fried chicken, or work in fine-dining, you must soak into your environment.”
In 2015, Sung’s first rendition of a now world-famous culinary brand was born in his adopted city: Mosu San Francisco.
“The Michelin Guide struggled to categorise his restaurant,” Sung says when the Guide awarded his restaurant one Michelin star a year after opening in 2016. As a Korean-American, he sourced produce and protein exclusively from the San Francisco Sunday produce market, eager to broadcast his global story with his local know-how.
Japanese touches from Los Angeles, French from The French Library, and Chinese influence from his family fast food restaurant came to the table. “We were Korean-ish,” he says. The Guide labelled his restaurant as American.
Sung left San Francisco shortly after his star award and opened Mosu Seoul in October 2017 in a nation experiencing a flourishing within its fine restaurant scene. Can Korean food be brought in the fine-dining space? With Mosu Seoul’s three Michelin stars, the answer is evident, yet requires a complex answer pertaining to Sung’s history as a chef.
“I am optimistic, but also sceptical of [fine-dining’s survival and future], because when you say Korean food in fine dining, can we push it even further? I think it has come very far.” The past eight years, Sung notes, has been the entire history of fine dining in South Korea. “My job as a chef and other chefs in our community is to push very hard to promote our ingredients, the way we cook, and the cultural aspect of educating on Korean flavours.”
Although, he admits “a fine dining restaurant is not the first thing that you should experience of Korean food,” Korean mania, be that K-pop, K-dramas, KTV, has propelled Korea’s fine-dining spaces, such as Mosu, Jungsik, Mingles, Onjium, Born & Bred, into the collective consciousness of Korean culture. He does not ignore the soft power Korean fine-dining has globally.
Where Mosu Seoul stood when born, and stands today, is narrating the Sung’s nostalgia, childhood meals, and multicultural world learnings on the table. Fine-dining is the format he is most comfortable to work within and Korean ingredients are simply the tools he interacts with locally on a daily basis. “We source every ingredient from Korea apart from truffles, because it’s a fine dining restaurant” [laughs].
“Cooking from the heart, I go back to when my grandmother used to cook for me,” Sung says of menu creation at Mosu Seoul. “The times that I spent with my family and when I went to other households, be that Virginia where I felt southern hospitality at the Thanksgiving dinner, Europe where grandmothers cooked for me, or San Francisco where I trained, those feelings and emotions stay in the heart and you express that on the plate. It translates into the food.”
“It is hard to articulate in language, but when you cook food, when you want to impress people and satisfy, it is not the recipes that matter. It is how much you care.”
The part-North Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and American impressions of Sung’s life paint a story of the cultures he has juggled yet embraced over a storied career. The buckwheat of North Korea, pickled rice of Japan, and sweet sauces of Chinese-American dining make their appearance at Mosu Seoul. Three generations of cooking comes to enlighten guests in the international Seoul neighbourhood of Itaewon.
When Sung first came to Hong Kong in 2015, his visit left him yearning to return to make an impact. “It is one of the most memorable places I have visited; my heart beats fast for it.” He launched Mosu Hong Kong in April 2022 at M+ Museum to tell his ancestral stories in a market already hungry for Mosu stories. A quarter of reservations made by foreign visitors at Mosu Seoul are from Hong Kongers.
“We have developed a way to express who we are still in the DNA of Mosul, but using different ingredients not just locally in Hong Kong, but from China.” Where the elements of Sung’s narrative stays consistent, the produce used is adapted to fit an international market. “Hong Kong offers such an abundance of ingredients from all over the world that Japan or Taiwan or elsewhere in Asia can’t,” he says.
The roots of his grandparents’ North Korean and Japanese story have stayed consistent with Sung throughout the Mosu brand in Asia. The standard has never changed.
“Since day one opening in Seoul until present in Hong Kong, we have never changed the standard of service of how we serve, how we make food, how we clean, how we greet each other, and how to greet. Through one, two, and three stars, we have stayed consistent and the same throughout.”
Reserve a lunch or dinner table at Mosu Hong Kong to delve into Sung’s telling of edible nostalgia.
