There are two vital pieces of information you should know about my tastes as a critic: I don’t have the largest appetite, and I believe there's nothing worse than leaving a tasting menu hungry. Most days, when I’m planning on a tasting menu for dinner, I stick to an extremely light, homemade lunch—or I will not make it through dessert, period. And nothing will disqualify a prix-fixe menu faster in my heart (or in my notes) than when I leave a restaurant in need of a few street tacos to ward off any stomach grumbling in the middle of the night.
Beautifully plated dishes made with impeccably sourced ingredients might taste good and look impressive, but if I’m literally left wanting more, you’ve already lost me. No matter how difficult the economics might be, a rumbling stomach is one of the fundamental tenets of hospitality: Restaurants are meant to nourish guests, not deprive them. This is why I was never the biggest fan of Koreatown’s now-closed Kinn, a wildly ambitious starter pack of a restaurant run by Ki Kim, a South Korea-born, Colorado-raised chef who cut his teeth cooking in Michelin-starred kitchens in New York City and San Francisco. In both cities’ fine dining scenes, upscale modernist Korean cuisine has firmly taken root among more traditional Japanese and French interpretations—including several kitchens Kim has personally passed through.
To anyone remotely familiar with national food trends, the critically acclaimed Kinn was an obvious attempt to propagate that style of modern Korean fine dining in L.A. When Kim first opened Kinn in late 2021, the city had surprisingly few upscale, chef-driven interpretations of Korean cuisine. The now-closed, critically acclaimed Yangban had just opened its doors, and the reopening of Baroo in the Arts District was two years in the future. The supplemental octopus with gochujang aioli at Kinn bore more than a passing visual similarity to a dish at NYC’s three Michelin star Jungsik, where Kim once worked.
The talented young chef also conceived of wholly original dishes like a porcine-shaped ice cream and cookie dessert inspired by a nostalgic childhood treat beloved in South Korea and its diaspora. But Kinn had one fatal flaw, at least in my eyes. Starting at $72 for much of its run—rising to $95 later on once Kim folded the octopus supplement into the prix-fixe—the seemingly reasonable price point translated into food portions so dainty I always needed to eat a snack afterwards.
Apparently, other diners felt similarly. At the end of 2023, Kinn shut its doors just days shy of being included in the Times’ 101 Best Restaurants, with Kim citing inconsistent business as well as severe burnout as reasons for the closure. Of course, that wasn’t the end of the line for the chef’s culinary career. After less than a year of working at two Michelin-starred Vespertine and Meteora (during which the latter also earned a star), Kim announced he was working on an independent project in partnership with Yoshiyuki Inoue, the chef-owner behind Sushi Kaneyoshi, one of the city’s best sushi restaurants.
For the average L.A. diner who doesn’t concern themselves with Michelin stars, Restaurant Ki is an undeniably delicious way to spend nearly $300 on dinner.
At some point last year, Inoue offered Kim a built-out chef’s counter adjacent to his Michelin-starred sushi counter in Little Tokyo and the cocktail-oriented omakase Bar Sawa. That opportunity has since blossomed into the newly Michelin-starred Restaurant Ki, which I sincerely believe is L.A.’s next great tasting menu, as well as one of the most interesting, essential fine dining experiences in the city right now.
Housed in the same underground complex as Kaneyoshi and Sawa, the minimalist chef’s counter in Little Tokyo debuted a week after January’s devastating wildfires started. As is often the case with fancier digs, Restaurant Ki comes at a much higher price point ($285) than its Koreatown predecessor. After visiting New York City in the spring and paying a visit to one of Kim’s old employers, Atomix—largely considered to be one of the world's best restaurants—and a second meal at Restaurant Ki over the summer, I can honestly say that I think it’s more than worth the money. With a few tweaks (namely, increased portion sizes), the eponymous eatery has finally attained the level of refined elegance and culinary execution that Kim initially set out to achieve with Kinn.
For the jet-setting gourmands among us, Restaurant Ki is a place that conceptually stands on its own two feet even as it pays homage to Atomix, Jungsik and Benu (all three being multiple Michelin-starred Korean restaurants where Kim has worked). As someone who first became acquainted with Kim’s cooking through Naemo, a short-lived dosirak pop-up during quarantine, Restaurant Ki translates into a glorious culmination of the chef’s growth, both personal and professional. Beyond that, it’s also, for the average L.A. diner who doesn’t concern themselves with Michelin stars, an undeniably delicious, utterly delightful way to spend nearly $300 on a fancy dinner.
Over a dozen rotating seafood-centric courses, Kim uses a mix of traditional Korean and classic French, fine-dining techniques to craft a uniquely L.A. Korean tasting menu experience rooted in farmer’s market seasonality. Salmon roe and smoked tomatoes offset a delicate, verdant quenelle of perilla leaf sorbet in a bowl framed by an enormous dried leaf—a plate technique with a direct throughline to Kim’s former employer, Jordan Kahn, whose presentations at Vespertine and Meteora draw abundant inspiration from the natural world. The chef has also reconfigured Kinn’s signature octopus dish as a tender two-bite dish paired with octopus head aioli and a sliver of local citrus.
While Restaurant Ki employs the usual culinary trappings of luxury, their deployment feels anything but perfunctory. Doenjang, morel mushrooms and a single strand of fermented ramp accompany dried raspberry-dusted lobster tails, carefully grilled over binchotan charcoal. Raspberry might seem like an unlikely pairing for seafood, but it works beautifully and nods to the slightly sweet flavor profile in evidence across many traditional Korean dishes (think of the sweet notes in bulgogi, galbi jjim or even ganjang gejang a.k.a. soy-marinated raw crab). Caviar comes atop a small mountain of purple potato purée, with spearhead squid concealed underneath in a manner not dissimilar to dishes I’ve had at Atomix and Vespertine in the last year.
The most welcome addition since my first visit in January, however, has been a choice bowl of seafood noodles sourced from Keizo Shinamoto, a Southern California-based chef who happens to be the inventor of the ramen burger. During my visit, Kim paired them with choice flecks of dungeness crab and topped the entire lot off with freshwater eel and finely minced myoga, or Japanese ginger. And unlike January, I actually left the premises feeling full.
Most people who visit Restaurant Ki will likely wax poetic about the mushroom-shaped ice cream sandwich, a visually appealing palate cleanser between savory courses and dessert. While I do find a savory ice cream sandwich delightful, it’s the recent final course integrating omija (or five-flavor berry) that impresses me most—though it took visiting New York City and about $500 out of my own personal bank account for the dish to truly hit home. Paired with an adorable dessert spoon, Kim distills the hard-to-find East Asian fruit into a dreamy omija tea granita topped with finger limes, cranberry jellies and strawberry lemonade fluff. It recalled, immediately, the omija sauce that Atomix paired with a rhubarb sorbet and compote plus a mint yogurt mousse in early May. But where the country’s leading Korean fine dining destination traffics in a palpable sense of restraint, Restaurant Ki employs a more freewheeling, distinctively Californian approach.
That extends to the service, which is subdued yet refined in the same style as the restaurant’s immediate neighbors Sawa and Kaneyoshi. Given the 10-seat chef’s counter setup and fairly modest space, I doubt that Restaurant Ki as it currently exists will ever emulate the spatial luxury of Atomix, which involves being guided down a stairwell past a tray of lush ingredients being used in your meal. Nor will it come close to the marvel of walking through the dining room at three Michelin star Providence in Hollywood, which feels like a mystical underwater wonderland after a recent renovation. But what it offers, instead, is the intimacy of a chef’s counter, with all the back-and-forth conversation between host and guest, never to be repeated quite the same way again.
In that particular way, Ki has plenty in common with Hayato, one of the hardest reservations in the city. The skillful wine pairing and newer non-alcoholic cocktail options, however, put it more in line with L.A.’s other best-in-class tasting menus, and particularly remind me of the booze-free options at Vespertine and Meteora. (This also might be because the drink program might be the only aspect of both restaurants I find even remotely compelling.) On my second visit, I enjoyed the clarified rhubarb juice with thyme syrup and the whiskey barrel-aged omija tea with lilac oil. They’re a bit more juice-like than the mocktails at Kato, which skillfully mimic the mouthfeel of alcohol, but a cut above the kombucha pairing of Baroo.
Which brings me to the next most logical rejoinder: How does Restaurant Ki compare to Baroo, the other modern Korean fine dining joint in L.A.? Putting aside the different price point ($150 vs $285), a dining experience at Baroo feels more rustic and spiritually grounded, where Restaurant Ki remains firmly ensconced in the globalized world of fine dining. Baroo chef-owner Kwang Uh draws plenty of inspiration from Korean Buddhist temple cuisine, with a particular emphasis on traditional fermentation. Kim, in contrast, who also received the Young Chef Award at Michelin’s awards ceremony in late June, eliminates almost every trace of the more traditional techniques used at Restaurant Ki with the type of culinary sleight of hand more commonly associated with the brigade system, chef’s tweezers and black latex gloves.
When I first visited Restaurant Ki, I left convinced that the experience was a little too niche for the average L.A. diner, describing it as a “worthy special-occasion eatery for those who enjoy Korean cuisine, rare seafood, fine dining or all of the above.” My second visit, however, blew all my expectations out of the water, and that was after being forced to reschedule a month later due to Downtown’s ICE-related curfew. Even with the reopening of Baroo and the (temporarily?) now-closed Yangban, L.A.’s upscale Korean dining scene still lacks the general recognition and popularity of Japanese, Italian and French counterparts. Restaurant Ki just might be the tipping point the city needs to change that—chef’s tweezers and all.
Restaurant Ki earned five stars—“amazing”—from us. To find out more about Time Out’s curation methods and ethics policies, head to our global “How we review” page.