The latter stews ($17) are vibrant bouquets of items like kimchi, tofu, squash and dainty mushrooms across three varieties. The former’s is the best $5 you can spend on eggs in New York City, the anchovy dashi-enhanced soufflé as light and lovely as a magic carpet ride. Gyeran jjim and jjigae are both available separately, and both are very good. The $80 butcher’s special is reasonably suited for two, and comes with each of Don Don’s five cuts: bone-in pork loin, belly, collar, jowl and rib (also listed à la carte for $35-$59), preceded by housemade banchan including peak daikon and onion kimchi.Īlso included, the jeon is a warm, welcoming introduction, its rectangular scallion-packed pancake yielding pleasantly from crisp to soft. His foray into Korean BBQ is also considerably more affordable than its lauded predecessors. It feels effortless, like the team and the menu and the space’s crowded grill-top tables just happen to happily coalesce even though it’s all the product of Shim’s experience and tremendous talent as a chef and restaurateur. It’s also already popular, and there isn’t really anywhere to stand and wait for reserved tables, and the doorway bottlenecks pretty easily, but it’s all upbeat enough to land more like a lark than a nuisance. Mari is fun, as is Kochi, particularly for expensive tasting destinations where the evening’s spend starts at $145 per person. “The guests have to enjoy, they have to have a good experience. “A restaurant is not only selling the food,” Shim tells me by phone the day of Mari’s debut. Don Don, the latest expansion in the Shim culinary universe, takes us from Korean skewers to hand rolls to barbecue. In between, he’s also collected Michelin stars for the first two, and snuck in Mari Ne as a more casual iteration of its namesake. First was Kochi, in 2019, followed by Mari in 2021, then Don Don this past September.

With his latest restaurant, chef Sungchul Shim has established a pattern of opening a great new place every other year.

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