[0:00]Hey, Jess here. This episode was recorded at Moon Mart on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woiwurung and Boonwurung people. I pay my respects to elders past and present. It always was and always will be, Aboriginal land. I was at a party recently and someone asked me where to go for breakfast. As a rule, I don't, because I suffer from the same syndrome most hospo people suffer from. The, if I can make it at home in under 10 minutes, I'm not going out for it syndrome. I have the skills, I have the coffee machine. I'm not leaving my home for eggs. So, what do I leave the house for? It's pretty much just an ethnic breakfast. A bowl of noodle soup in a broth that's been simmering overnight. Yum Cha comprised of an array of dumplings I don't have to stuff and pleat myself. Arepa filled with mochi. You get the idea. Not eggs. But as soon as I say this, I'm also asked what I think of or the new one called, or I cringe. I cringe because they're places where chefs who have no experience cooking Asian food, put poorly executed Asian dishes on their menu. Congee with a big breakfast on it, smoked trout with furikake. The dreaded scrambled eggs and kimchi. But there are some chefs out there who manage to pull it off.
[1:36]My name is Unhee An, and I am the chef at Moonmart. I try to create Korean food that people can enjoy and understand. On paper, Unhee An's dishes at Moonmart sound like most other Asian cafes. Curried scrambled eggs on shokupan, bulgogi sausage muffin with chili jam, pandan lamingtons. Someone asks me how I can tell the difference between somewhere like Moonmart and somewhere like Truthfully, I just know. It's in my gut. Some call it intuition. I call it cultural competence. But really, it's just a ton of research, both with my eyes and my mouth. You'd think that if a chef has professional experience in one cuisine and lived experience in another, they'd be able to seamlessly match them up. This, I've discovered, is a rare skill. What I am good at it is playing around with flavors and know what flavor goes well with what. So, what makes Un's food at Moonmart work where others fall flat? Is there a secret to repackaging cuisine, and who is allowed to do it? This is Korean food and how I grew up. So if you think this is Korean food and it's weird, then you're totally getting wrong perspective about Korean food. I'm Jess Ho, and this is For the Culture, a podcast about how food shapes us and how we shape food. This is episode four, Who gets to experiment?
[3:20]I'm meeting my producer a few buildings away from Moonmart in South Melbourne, trying to organize ourselves to interview Un while battling the wind. And we're running a few minutes behind. Oh, good morning. So excited to be here. 3 minutes late.
[3:40]Hey, we're out the front, sorry. How are you? I watch Mae, Un's business partner in Moonmart, who takes care of everything front of house. Flip the sign over to say they're open. She comes over to take my order. Are you going to sit down and have coffee first? Yeah? Yeah, uh, take the one behind. Just pop your stuff in. Thank you. A line immediately forms for takeaway coffees, the best tables have been claimed, and there's already people perusing the condiment shelf stacked with Un's housemade sauces. So this one is like literally like a green chili chopped up and then mixed through like a and chovy. Over the years, I've seen Moonmart's menu slowly shift. It opened with all the crowd-pleasing dishes I mentioned earlier, but I'm more drawn to the new dishes Un's put on like, hwe-deopbap, mushroom jangjorim, and this, which I'm eating on a table by the street outside. So this breakfast is based on how I grew up eating. Little bit of side-banchans that include fresh kimchi. I never really eat fermented kimchi, so my grandma always made fresh kimchi every morning. Salted and dried grilled mackerel, fermented cucumber mixed with shiso, daikon, and this reddish soup is basically mixed with three different types of stock, which is clam, pork and anchovy. And then I add some fermented miso paste and green radish tops, and the rice is cured egg yolk with sesame oil. Oh, this is how I like to eat. Like I'm I'm insanely happy. The breakfast set is served across an array of bowls and plates, which can be intimidating. But the thing is, it's really a choose your own adventure. Protein, carb, salt, fat, crunch, acid, it's all there. Put what you want on your spoon, make the perfect bite.
[5:43]Oh, that's so good. If I could eat egg yolks with no health repercussions. My my diet would be way too many egg yolks. This dish of salted grilled mackerel with rice and banchan is not how a lot of Melbournians think of Korean food. But this is how Koreans eat day-to-day. The fried chicken and Korean barbecue people immediately think of is all big and amplified. Salt, crunch, fried, sweet, saucy, carby, processed, they're sometimes foods. What people think about Korean food is like, it's more about like a drinking food, fried chicken or barbecue, something that is like more fun side than an actual like a flavor. And I was a little bit scared to actually first time like tell people that like, hey, look, like Korean food is not all about like that kind of food. It can be like subtle, but also like a powerful. There's lots of things that you can learn about Korean food. I think the delicate food is something that actually brings out the umami from the ingredients. And when I make a soup, instead of like using just a water, I love mixing like combinations of three different dashis, and then like a using a very good ingredient. So I thought that's what I can do really well. It took a while for Un to get here. She spent a long time cooking food that she knew people would instantly respond to, rather than what she really wanted to. I was a little bit shy about it, so first time I didn't do it, but then I am quite stubborn. So I need to actually do things that I think is right, and I did believe that it is right to let people know what actual Korean food is, and I wanted them to know like what food I grew up and that Korean food is not just all about gochujang or doenjang or soy sauce. I needed them to know like how delicate food it can be and flavorful. I was still scared to put it on the proper menu, so I started as a weekend special, but then it became like, oh my God, Moonmart's weekend special, like it's super Korean. And it became famous and that's I think what made the queue at Moonmart. There was a time that I once did the gamjatang for the special on summer, and we didn't even have aircon and everyone just sitting there like sweating, but still like, oh my God, this is like the best gamjatang I had. I'm laughing because gamjatang is such a winter dish. It's pork bones stewed with potatoes, perilla seeds, and gochugaru. I'd have a blood nose if I ate it in summer. And it was quite fun memory, and like a guy came and said like, look, I know that you don't really do takeaways for the special Korean foods, but I actually really enjoyed this dish, and um, my grandma is in hospital, and then I really want to bring this dish to her. And I was like, so touched, and I was like, yeah, sure, like, please do takeaway. And then I think that customer actually gave me a little bit of confidence, so I started to like keep on doing it more, yeah. That I realized, okay, people actually do like something that can be authentic or different.
[9:03]Even though Un now runs a successful business in Melbourne, this wasn't always her plan. Can you tell me how you ended up in Australia? I am from Korea, and then I came to Australia to just have a like a travel visit, and I got a little bit fascinated by the food culture here. I started as a full French cuisine, and to be honest, my dream was to become a best French chef and end up in a French. After I worked a couple of like French restaurant, fine dining restaurant, I worked at the Cloh's, and I started to learn about like Asian cuisine meets Western cuisine, and it was kind of interesting. Cloh's was an institution. It is remembered for being part of the Golden Age of restaurants in Sydney and redefined fine dining when it evolved from classical French to contemporary French-Asian. It was last owned by Chui Lee Look, a female chef from Singapore, who Un cooked under in her early years, no doubt leaving her mark on Un's style. After it closed in 2013, Un went to open up Moon Park and then Paper Bird. While both served Korean food, I saw the progress from approachable drinking food to more thoughtful, elegant, lesser known dishes. Leaving Sydney marked another chapter in her self-discovery. Why did you move to Melbourne? Good question. I think I was a little bit burnt out being a chef in Sydney, because I think I worked like 70 hours a week, like non-stop being. And then Covid came, and I just stayed at home like wandering around what I can do. And back then, Sydney was amazingly expensive, and I needed to find somewhere I can actually be comfortable and cozy. And I was kind of like looking like around where I can actually end up, and I always like Melbourne because people are kind of friendly, the social are very like opened about lots of diversity foods. So I was like, okay, maybe I should just move to Melbourne, and then I just packed everything and came in like a week or something, yeah. That's amazing. So Melbourne's cheaper? Melbourne's cheaper, yes, and um, less boring than Brisbane, so, yeah. So, there Un was, having worked in one of the most revered restaurants in Australia, but she realized she wanted to cook Korean food and didn't know how to properly make kimchi. I know how kimchi should taste, and then like, fermentation is a little bit hard than like it actually is. It's not just like, oh, yeah, you put percentage of salt and then you ferment for a few days that's the fermentation. No, because like, it depends on the weather, like depends on what like ingredients you put it in, like how the cabbage is, everything is just affects to the fermentation. And I'm not going to lie, I actually failed a few times when I first started making kimchi. And making kimchi was like every day my life with my grandma. But she never ever told me her secrets.
[12:05]I realized, oh, okay, like to make a good kimchi, I need her secrets. So, yeah, so I called her, and then I was like, how do you make kimchi? Like, what did you do? And then like, she's an Asian grandma, like, of course, she doesn't have any recipe. She was like, oh, just put like a pinch of this, pinch of that, this and that. I'm like, okay. That's how you ferment, yeah. It was not that helpful, but it was like helpful, yeah. I understand. And that's how I started Moonmart. I just started to make like a condiments and kimchis that I used to grow up, and then like people started to liking it. And I was like, oh, okay, and I started to make little like lunchboxes for people to enjoy, and that kind of got weirdly famous. So I was like, okay, maybe I need like a kitchen and like a proper place that I need to make. So I guess, you know, you started your little Moon Mart thing out of lunchboxes. How did you end up, I guess, cooking in a cafe and having that concept there? It was really funny like, my original concept was, I just needed a small kitchen to make my condiments and then maybe sell like a one rice ball. That's how I ended up in that North Melbourne garage space with six seats. But I didn't need someone, so I just called May, and then I was like, do you just want to be with me doing things? And then she was like, yeah, sure, I like your food. So she just literally moved from Sydney for me, and then we opened like six seat cafe and me making condiment and May just like being there, being my dishie. And then we're like, okay, let's just sell like a maybe like a pastry or like a coffee and little like a rice ball a day. And suddenly, the first day when we opened, I still remember me and May were like talking about it. How many rice per day we will sell? Let's prepare like five. And then like in like a week, people like started to hear about us, and then everyone like started to come, and I'm like, oh, this is not the way like we wanted, but well, I was glad that people liked it. So we opened the back space and then did a little bit more proper food, yeah. But never intended to open a cafe. No. It just happened.
[14:26]Un historically likes to sell herself short. She forgets her own pedigree, Cloh's, followed by her own hugely celebrated restaurants. She's very hard on herself, which is why her food is so good. But it takes someone like May, someone who's much more than a business partner to encourage Un to do bigger things. So as Moon Mart's evolved, you've introduced your monthly Korean dinners. Why have you chosen to do these and what are you trying to showcase? Well, I've always wanted to do kind of fine Korean food, but I never really made myself to do it. But then like this time I went to Korea and I visited a couple of like fancy restaurants and what they do, and I started to be like feeling a little bit of jealousy of like what they are doing. And then I came back and I said to May, look, I'm a little bit like tired of like just a cafe food, like, I want to experiment something, I want to do something, and I want to let people know what Korean food is also, but I don't know like how to. And then like next day May just came back to me and said, oh look, I just apply for a special dinner events to government, so you can do the dinners and do whatever you want. And I was like, okay, um, cool. So that's how it started, like, I kind of like wanted to do it, but I never had the courage to like push it, and I guess May pushed the button to do it. So, yeah. It's almost impossible to get a seat at these dinners. When I went, Mae did an amazing job of making this airy light cafe feel like a completely different venue. The lights were dimmed, a curtain was put up so you couldn't see the counter. The retail condiment shelf was moved into the back for more floor space. I was welcomed with a drink on arrival and fed a set meal. A riff on crudites using Un's green chili and chovy sauce, a procession of snacks including a mandu using fish in place of a dumpling wrapper, her famed abalone joke, bossam with banchan, and tteokbokki. It was Korean food, absolutely, but each element had been touched by a thought, a technique, or influence she'd picked up by cooking in Australia. She used European salt cured anchovies instead of dried, cleaned veg using a foundational French technique, snuck dairy into unmentionable places, and it was great. So when you think of these menus for the dinners, because I've been to one and they're amazing. It's not strictly like Korean food in traditional way, you put your own spin on things. What do you do in that process to make the dishes like uniquely yours? Hmm. My thinking was Korean food is really good with cheese, like Korean food actually tastes better with butter. I still think just doing a really, really authentic Korean food, I am not really skilled enough yet, because I still need to study more and learn the skills what old-time Korean food was. So I just kind of thought like what I am good at is playing around with flavors and know what flavor goes well with what. So I think that's why I started to like mixing butters into like gochujang or like a cream into the doenjang and stuff like that. That actually can be still authentic, but not overpowering, but flavorful, like, yeah. I'm not so sure like how I started to do it, or like, I'm a very spontaneous person, so when I get something into brain, it just kind of happens like straight up, yeah. So it's a bit of your study, intuition, and understanding flavor? Yeah, let's say like that, yeah. So for you, because I know that you do a lot of research and development, what happens when something goes wrong? For you, why are you unhappy with a dish before you put it up? So when I think about the dish, how I approach is, the perfect dish is inside my head. And then I started to mix and match like, start cooking this way, that way, but the reality is sometimes I go wrong, then I get like super upset. And I can't accept that it is wrong, so I play around more like this and that way, like, and it takes always time and I cry a lot. But at the end, it always like gets to the point where it should be, so, but I think that's what every like chefs kind of like suffer like, how when they create dishes, I don't think everyone can make it into like perfect one to go. But I think that's also the beauty of how you create dishes. Because sometimes like, I think this way won't work, but then that way actually works. For example, the abalone joke. I mix through with cream and put the bomb butter to mellow it down the abalone gut flavor, and then when I did it, I was like, oh, this is not going to work, but then it actually worked.
[19:49]Juk is a rice porridge and it's spread throughout Asia. Each country, state, and region has their own version according to history and geography. Across Asia, abalone is considered a royal or luxury food. Abalone juk in particular is deeply rich and complex, because it's not just made using the meat of the mollusc, but its internal organs too. When I ate that dish, I thought to myself, this tastes like abalone juk, but it's different. I couldn't quite put my finger on how it was richer and more integrated. The last move I would've expected from Un was dairy. I admire the deception. Well played. So is there a dish that you've made that you're particularly proud of and why? I have a two sing was I made my own silken tofu, and um there is a Korean dish called Samgyetang that you put lots of like herba stuffs into a chicken and then you boil it. So it's kind of herbal chicken soup, but I wanted to make it like super chickeny, but also clean, like flavorful. So I made the base stock, and then I used the Chinese technique using double boiled, and I made another like really clean, like superior double boiled stock. And there's like a sesame oil that's made with like a black sesame oil that actually tastes like egg yolk, and I thought, oh, chicken and egg yolk flavor would like go super well. So I put that on the dish. I think that was one of like 2000 something best dish or something that I was very proud of, yeah. Yes, I remember it. It was delicious. So good. I still think about it. So you're slowly adapting your menu to have more traditional Korean food on there, like you know, the salted grilled fish for breakfast. Why are you making these subtle changes? Well, first of all, cafe is like a little bit comfortable now and like we have a regulars who love and stuff. But then also, our regulars are very funny. They love requesting things to us, and I guess some part of the people will just have a bread in the morning like me, but some people love to eat rice in the breakfast, like Jess. So, um, I kind of thought, okay, like let's just do it, let's just like put things that can be challenging, but maybe 20% of people will like, then it will still be the dish that I like, so, yeah, I just put it on, yeah. If you were to ask me 15 years ago where to go for Korean food, I'd be stumped. We didn't have a lot of variety in Melbourne. It was K barbecue, fried chicken, or bust. But that's because we didn't have the community. Now, we have places that specialize in gukbap, sundae, kimbap, and more traditional ways of eating, like at Solsang, Sogum, and Chae. Do you think that you're part of, I guess, this newer generation where you're educating people more on the breadth of Korean food? Oh, I hope so.
[22:46]I, I hope so, but, um, yeah, I think like how you say like ondo sogum, or like also myself, like how we create dishes that's not really like well-known as like a Korean food, and people come and like kind of like experience can be a little bit like a education side because I took my friend once who only knows Korean food and fried chicken and stuff like that, and I took him to Sogum. And he was kind of shocked that like, oh, okay, this is a Korean food, and I said to him, yeah, like, for me, like this is Korean food, and how I grew up. So if you think this is Korean food, and it's weird, then you're totally getting wrong perspective about Korean food. And he was like, oh, okay, like, and he was kind of interested about it. So, yeah, I guess like, what we do is kind of slowly, like very slowly changing about what Korean food is toward the people who doesn't know yet. But I do think we need to kind of more improve to like explain to people. Instead of just like putting the dish and saying like, hey, here, I do think we need to be a little bit more improved, saying like, hey, this is like a dish that we like used to grow up eating, like how we used to do it, so people can actually fully understand. Also a little bit of that fine dining service in there. Yeah, I think we do need.
[24:10]So I guess, has that changed your mission for Moonmart slowly over time? Yeah, like, it kind of like slowly changes, and I do think I will be a little bit more ambitious and be a little bit more bold about like what I do, because I realized that there are lots of people who actually are more interested in the stuffs that they never knew. So if I can, yeah, I will progress more about like my culture side food, so I can like let people know who I am and what food it is. And I think that's why I'm doing this podcast too, like just to like, yeah, let people know. You probably can't tell from hearing us, but Un and I are the same age. It's no wonder we are on similar trajectories with our Asian pride. We were both raised in a time when we were told that only one kind of cuisine, French cuisine, was respected. I was surprised to hear that she grew up wanting to be a French chef, because of the food she serves today. I think if she pursued her culinary journey outside of Australia, that could have been a possibility. But with a strong migrant culture here and spending her formative years in Cloh's changed her view somehow. To answer the question back at the party, I should have said, you can still elevate or modernize a dish when you're still highlighting its foundations, rather than altering it for a different palette. That's how I know the food will make sense. That's how I know it will be good. Kind of like the abalone juk, or the grilled mackerel served with a superfluous but entirely welcome cured egg yolk. When I ate those dishes, I could tell it was a full circle moment for Un. It does give me a little bit of joy and like a proudness that I am Korean, and I'm in Australia, and I'm a very good chef here, yeah. That kind of, yeah, proudness. What's that saying? First you assimilate, then you appreciate, and finally, you celebrate. Yeah, it's funny like because like I think at the end, everyone kind of follows their like hard, yeah, hard. Like I think that's how I ended up like I complained to Mae every day like I'm steady like six and then I'm making a kimchi at the moment, but I complain, but I actually do enjoy it, like on the other side, yeah. I'm quite proud of it. There's a stage where we all turn into old aunties. Yeah, that's true. I'm not ready yet. No.
[26:59]For the Culture is an SBS podcast. It's hosted and created by me, Jess Ho. Beth Atkinson Quinton is our executive producer. Our senior producer is El Marsh. Beth Zoda is our producer, and our sound designer is Nicole Pingon. The series is mixed by Max Gosford. Our theme and additional original music is by Jon Chia. Our artwork is from Jason Foo. Thanks to our guests Unhee An, and at SBS, Joel Papi and Bernadette Fung Nam Nguyen. In the next episode, we're chatting weirdos, post-punk, and food in space. So make sure you follow For the Culture in your favorite podcast app. What's your favorite dish to eat in Melbourne, and where? You like Negroni.
[27:52]I eat Negroni. I eat Negroni. Um, my favorite dish that I love in Melbourne is I think it's a, you know that superior bros with the dumplings in the flour drum?
