Joo Ok

In the heart of Koreatown, a freight elevator climbs to a calm, hanok-echoing dining room with skyline views. Chef Chang-ho Shin serves a Korean tasting menu that reads traditional and contemporary at once, with crisp technique and a taste for quiet intensity, from pheasant mandu with foie gras and morels to spotted prawn and geoduck dressed in vivid green house-made perilla oil. Desserts land with the same precision, often finishing with a warm sunchoke tea.

• A freight elevator ride to a 16th-floor dining room that nods to a hanok, minimalist, calm, with skyline views.
• A farm-and-fermentation loop that runs through the whole operation, perilla seeds grown upstate, oil cold-pressed in-house, scraps fermented into vinegars, teas, and syrups, waste composted back to the farm.
• A strict tasting-menu experience with clearly stated limits on dietary accommodations, built for precision rather than flexibility.

• House-made jang, the restaurant’s in-house fermentation base for sauces.
• Perilla, including perilla oil cold-pressed in-house on a weekly cadence.
• Herbs and vegetables grown at the restaurant’s upstate New York farm.

Tasting-menu only. A 12-course Korean tasting menu built around seasonality, fermentation, and a house pantry of jang. The restaurant lists the menu at $270 per person and notes it is closed on Sundays.

Dietaries, the restaurant notes it cannot accommodate gluten, vegetarian, vegan, shellfish, or allium.