At Atomix, a Korean Restaurant Overflowing With Ideas

KODE IKLAN ADSENSE TENGAH ARTIKEL (336X280)

A card is set down in front of you before each new course arrives at Atomix, the tasting-menu restaurant in Murray Hill run by Junghyun Park and his wife, Jeungeun. Each is printed with a boldface transliteration of a Korean word under an abstract design of geometric shapes and lines. They look like flashcards from a school run by progressive graphic designers.

This sounds as if it would get old, but it doesn’t. Very early on, you learn that on the other side of these vocabulary exercises lie dishes of wonderful intricacy, sophistication and beauty. One after another, each of the 10 courses in the $175 meal opens up new ideas about Korean cuisine and culture. In the Atomix pedagogical method, instruction is followed closely by reward. (While we are working on vocabulary: The restaurant’s name is pronounced, somewhat counterintuitively, a-toe-mix.)

Many of the rewards are the kind you eat, of course. Guk-which-means-soup is a shimmering broth that Mr. Park, the chef, makes from fermented tomatoes and kelp; chilled and poured over scallop slices layered between slivers of green tomato that have been marinated in Korean fig vinegar, the broth has an electrifying sweet-sour balance.

The dish may not scream “Korean cuisine,” but the next one does. This is hwe — Korean for raw, you’ll recall, and also the term for Korean-style sashimi. The fish is striped jack, brushed with plum vinegar sauce. Slices of it are folded around a mild fermented chile, a few drops of sesame oil and bits of kimchi made from cabbage and ramps.

Sitting over each slice of jack is a crisp square of gim, which the Japanese call nori. Pinch some fish inside the gim and eat it, and the flavors that unspool are some of those that are brought to the table with Korean sashimi, but they’re put together with a harmony that’s hard to achieve when you swab them yourself under the influence of a few glasses of soju.

Inspired by a poem from the Choson era, Mr. Park summoned an entirely different set of flavors for the hwe on Atomix’s opening menu, which ran from late May to early September. Then, the fish was sea bream, firm and chewy, marinated overnight with ginger in a magnificently good tangerine vinegar from the island of Jeju. Eaten with sea urchin, plain spinach, sparkling shards of jelly made from pale young soy sauce, and Chinese-mustard leaves fermented in some wonderful way, it was so deeply harmonic I wouldn’t have minded if Mr. Park had served it over and over for the rest of the meal.

Centuries before it became the fashion among American chefs, fermentation was a pillar of Korean cuisine. Atomix exploits it in all kinds of ways. Fermentation bends a mix of juices from Korean pears, green apples and pineapple toward a cidery direction that makes it a thrilling marinade, braising liquid and sauce for exquisitely rich Wagyu strip loin.

It’s the foundation for an array of vinegars you won’t find on the average table in Koreatown: cherry blossom, persimmon, mugwort, birch. And, of course, fermentation is behind the restaurant’s arsenal of pickled vegetables, the most interesting of which may be the tart brussels sprouts that Mr. Park serves in banchan format alongside roast duck with a mole sauce that could pass muster in Mexico if Mr. Park did not up the funk level with gochujang.

Some of these ingredients were fermented or otherwise preserved in South Korea. Many more were put up for storage at Atoboy, the Parks’ other restaurant, over the past year or more as the Parks prepared to open Atomix.

Atoboy’s food is woven around traditional banchan dishes, and while Mr. Park gives himself room to play, the cooking there stays true to the fairly simple origins of banchan. His tasting menus at Atomix make a quantum leap in complexity. It’s like seeing the guy who strums the 12-string guitar on the L platform pick up a conductor’s baton and lead an orchestra through a Mahler symphony. On the back of Atomix’s flashcards he lists the components of each dish, and each of their ingredients — around 20 on average, very few of them ordinary and none of them out of place. Nothing at Atomix tastes confused or overburdened.

The dishes are even more elaborate than those at Jungsik, the rarefied Korean-inspired restaurant downtown where Mr. Park was the chef de cuisine before he and his wife struck out on their own. And while Jungsik seems determined to stuff Korean flavors into an outdated French formality, Atomix is warm, contemporary and Korean at just about every turn.

Small snacks, like miniature tarts on a bed of mussel shells, lead off the tasting menu.CreditDaniel Krieger for The New York Times

The Parks, who were raised in South Korea, hired a Seoul architecture firm, Studio Writers, to remake two floors of a secretive-looking townhouse on East 30th Street. Upstairs is a small bar where you can slither into a pale-leather booth to idle over smartly conceived snacks like soy-marinated scallop jerky; beef tartare, mixed with red and black pepper, and under a snowfall of pecorino; or fried wings stuffed with fried rice and dusted with ground Sichuan peppercorns.

Stairs descend to a bright, skylit lounge of upholstered benches where the tasting menu kicks off with a couple of hors d’oeuvres and drinks. The idea must be for you to leave the shuffle of Manhattan behind in stages, but I always spent my few minutes in this way station eyeing the comfortable, dark, wood-clad den a few steps away where the rest of the meal is served at a 14-seat counter.

The natural materials and simple lines in the tasting room seem to bow toward Korea’s long Zen tradition, and a kind of purposeful calm reigns there. Servers and cooks all wear flowing, boat-neck shirts in a shimmering pewter color that gives them a slight science-fiction look; they are the work of a Korean-born New York designer, Sungho Ahn.

Ms. Park, who goes by Ellia, glides behind the counter, smiling and holding out a cloth case to offer a pair of the Korean-made chopsticks she collects. They’re beautiful objects, and so are the handmade plates and bowls that begin to file out of the kitchen, each made by a potter or glass worker or wood carver in South Korea. These artisans are identified on the menu cards, whose abstract designs are the work of a South Korean artist.

Tasting menus can be arid and sterile when a chef doesn’t have much to say. The format comes to life when a restaurant is overflowing with ideas, like Atomix. The way the Parks put Korean culture in the foreground recalls the early days of the Four Seasons, which moved beyond European models of formal dining by hiring an American architect and American industrial designers to go along with the American ingredients and even American wines.

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10 Easy Steps to Succeed in Your Online Classes

Congratulations Youve made up our minds to pursue your upper schooling, and doing so online is how to pass if you have an interest in a versatile, studentcentered educating manner. Studying online permits you to pursue different pursuits and attend to different responsibilities whilst nonetheless operating your method towards some extent. However, it will now and again imply that its clean to get distracted. Here are 10 clean steps to verify luck on your online categories.

Connect together with your instructors once conceivable. Even in case you are doing smartly within the category, its extraordinarily vital to increase a rapport together with your trainer. When you do that early on, you temporarily understand what the priorities are within the route, what expectancies the professor has of you and youre going to be motivated to prevail, surer of whats forward and higher ready to do smartly with the impending subject material.

Valuable questions to invite your trainer come with the next

How versatile are you with time limits How versatile are you with grownup freshmen What applied sciences do you employ within the route How to be had are you through e mail and different sorts of verbal exchange How do you put up an internet neighborhood and what are the expectancies for participation in it In addition, since instructors are to be had to lend a hand all over the classes, its all the time just right to have had private touch with the trainer early on. This method, when you wish to have lend a hand, its more straightforward to achieve out and get the help you wish to have.

Confirm the technical necessities of the route. Online categories can also be very advisable for college kids with busy schedules, however provided that they are able to simply get right of entry to the fabrics. It is vital to obviously perceive what the technical necessities are. So, ahead of the route begins or as quickly thereafter as conceivable, youll want to test that your pc will paintings with the entire online equipment, and that you understand how to navigate them. This will be sure that you dont must spend time all the way through the route attempting to determine the generation.

three. Create a time table and stick with it. Quality online instructors create classes which might be clean to navigate and feature transparent expectancies. Having that roughly easytodealwith framework in position will make learning and succeeding that a lot more straightforward. However, although the framework and necessities of your category arent as transparent, youll create a time table and construction, which is able to very much fortify your probabilities of luck within the route. Using equipment equivalent to Google Calendar is a good way to start out. Knowing how your weeks and months glance and scheduling blocks of analysis time for each and every activity or module will will let you stick with a time table.

four. Ask questionsall the time. When you dont perceive, ask questions. When you do perceive, ask additional questions. Instructors recognize scholars who take part, and if theres a participation or dialogue part a part of the grade, then asking high quality questions is helping guarantee your grade on this space. Even if there isnt a participation part, its all the time helpful to invite inquiries to remember to perceive the fabric and are transparent on what is needed of you.

five. Be arrangedand keep arranged. Students whore taking conventional, campusbased classes most often have a constant time table to observe each and every week, through which study room instruction is adopted through assignments out of doors the category. However, for online classes, scholars will have to search out their very own techniques to stick on most sensible in their paintings. It is crucial that you just be arranged from the start of the semester with the intention to achieve success in an internet route. For instance mark task due dates on your calendar, discover a submitting machine for each online subject material and bodily subject material that is helping you stay monitor of the whole lot simply, and shed light on find out about schedules that duvet sections of the route one by one so youve got an arranged tactic to protecting the semesters subject material as you pass alongside.

Have a blank, quiet, and constant workspace. One factor online and inclass classes have in not unusual is that scholars all the time want a spot to review or whole assignments this is blank, quiet, and constant. You can select the place that is for youwhether or not its at a espresso store, a college library, a devoted place of business, or at house. Wherever you select to review and whole assignments, you must make it a constant location that doesnt have out of doors distractions. It is basically key that where is quiet and lets you focal point in your paintings with out distractions.
Do no longer procrastinate. Successful distance freshmen hardly procrastinate. They dont do away with assignments or wait till the final second to write down their papers. Successful online scholars experience freedoms that come with operating at their very own tempo and the facility to finish their paintings in as a lot time because it takes them. On the opposite hand, they know that finishing their assignments is best performed early and on time cramming merely doesnt paintings, and it doesnt will let you retain knowledge longterm. Get began early on getting a success.

eight. Work in your studying comprehension. Successful distance freshmen generally tend to have just right studying comprehension abilities. Most conventional, campusbased scholars concentrate to lectures and take notes, and a few online classes additionally require this. However, the vast majority of distance freshmen are anticipated to grasp subject material thru a large amount of studying. Although far finding out classes be offering video recordings and audio clips, maximum systems require scholars to hide and grasp a considerable amount of written knowledge. If it is a problem for you, it could be very useful to first sign up in a studying comprehension route there are lots of assets online that will help you do that. This ability by myself could make a huge distinction on your luck.

nine. Establish and admire routines that be just right for you. If, for instance, youre employed best within the morning or in brief bursts, then set find out about routines that can help you find out about within the prelunch hours when your mind is contemporary. If, then again, you do best through learning at evening or at the weekends when youll devote nightowl hours or longer blocks in your learning, then make it some degree to take action. Consider how and whilst you paintings best, and enforce a find out about plan that respects the routines that be just right for you.

Connect together with your friends. Establishing sturdy connections with friends and professors is a very powerful facet of tutorial luck, in addition to skilled development. One of essentially the most rewarding reports in schooling is finding out thru collaboration. Forming significant relationships together with your friends and professors can can help you be told extra, keep motivated, and feature an outlet to specific your personal working out of subject material. So, keep attached thru message forums, chat rooms, e mail, and different digital assets. And take note lots of the other people you meet in faculty shall be conceivable process assets down the road so determine connections and keep in contact

Florida National University gives a wealth of tutorial and professional online classes. Check out the entire choicesyour long run is ready