The Beauty of Simplicity - Chef Park

Chef Woongchul Park and his wife Bomee Ki run Sollip, a trailblazing Korean restaurant in Bermondsey. Take a look at these two plant-forward dishes - sensational.

Between them, the pair have worked in restaurants including The Ledbury (now sadly closed), Koffmann’s and The Arts Club. They named their restaurant after the Korean word for ‘pine needle’, which is considered to be the best ingredient to control flames and smoke in traditional Korean cuisine.

Here is Dish 1 - ‘Winter White Salad’. This dish is assembled using root vegetables such as chervil root, celeriac, kohl rabi and turnip.

“It’s very simple,” explains chef Park. “The top layer is chervil root, cut with a truffle slicer. The jug is pine nut milk. The bottom layer is a julienne of turnip , kohl rabi and celeriac. The first two are raw - salted first then we squeeze out the water to make the texture more crunchy. We mix with very finely chopped pine nuts to give some nuttiness and different flavours. And sprinkle with cold pressed perilla seed oil. What I wanted to show with that plate was quite simplistic. “

Dish 2 is called ‘Carrot & Carrot’.

“The carrot dish is more complicated,” says Park. “You can see the different colours. Half of them are cooked in a vacuum pack with cooking liquor. The other half are a white kimchi. There are so many different types of kimchi in Korea. This one is watery and white, called ‘Dongchimi’. It was fermented a very long time - nearly one year. We serve with goat’s cream, a dill mustard vinaigrette, hazelnut oil and hazelnuts.” (Picture credit @shinmiura)