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Sunn's, which opened late last year on the Lower East Side, is a real restaurant, where chef Sunny Lee, known and loved for the pop-up Banchan by Sunny, has found a permanent home. Behind the bright yellow-and-green facade in the middle of Dimes Square is a small space: twenty-four seats at tables and counters in a closet-sized room that should fit ten fewer. But there's an indescribable sense of friendliness about Sunn's, as if it were radiating a relaxed warmth through the vents, and that intimacy feels like an extension of the restaurant's welcoming atmosphere. One particularly cold evening, I was nearly caught in a snow storm, and after I took off my coat and sat down on a stool at a wooden bar table at the end of the room, a waiter served me a drink: a Sunn's-style hot punch made with soju, yuzu, and lemon, in a classic We Are Happy to Serve You paper cup.
Soft, springy tteokbokki (rice cakes) are coated in gochujang tomato sauce and baked in individual-sized pans under a layer of snowy stracciatella cheese—an inspired take on Italian cuisine.
Sitting at the counter, I watched Lee work the kitchen (what a kitchen! It’s a narrow, linear area running behind the counter, like a studio galley), as she apparently does every night. With a sous or two at her side, she leads the show, plating, decorating, and chatting cheerfully with customers and staff. Here, as in her pop-up, Lee is a joy to show off her chef’s craft. She does it in a way that makes it look easy—conjuring up dozens of little dishes, doing all the prep work and tasks that go into this kind of pickle- and fermentation-heavy cuisine, and honing the physical choreography—but, more powerfully, she does it in a way that makes it look fun. There’s artistry in her dishes, but none of the smugness of an artist. Drawing on Korean cuisine, she deftly experiments with global harmonies: a signature dish of stir-fried and marinated mushrooms, meaty oysters, and chewy wood ear dressed in a garlicky tahini dressing, or eggplant namul (long-boiled until the vegetable falls apart like an overexerted pop star) with an unexpected caponata-style twist, an Eastern European twist of raisins and bits of pickled celery.
Sourse: newyorker.com
