The path to Chunjinam Hermitage winds upward through the forested slopes of Baekyangsa, past the Ssanggyeru pavilion where the white stone cliffs of Baenghakbong mirror themselves in still water below. By the time you reach the small hermitage set into the mountainside, the mountain has already done something to your pace — slowed it, quieted it, without quite deciding to.
If you know Jeong Kwan at all — a Buddhist nun who has lived at Chunjinam Hermitage for over four decades — you likely know her through a screen. The 2017 Netflix documentary that opened the third season of Chef's Table still circulates as the one people describe as a spiritual experience. The New York Times called her "The Philosopher Chef." Chefs including Eric Ripert and René Redzepi have credited her as a source of transformation. She has cooked at Yale, at Le Bernardin, at events across Europe — all from a hermitage with no menu, no reservations, and no restaurant. She became one of the most quietly influential figures in the global food world without ever leaving the mountain.
We arrived on the third day of the Kim'C Market Culinary Odyssey — a small-group journey through Korea built on years of direct relationships with the country's most respected food makers. Not as visitors with a booking, but as guests. In the weeks before the trip, Ryan had tried — more than once — to confirm the details. A schedule. A rough plan. Something to brief the group on. Jeong Kwan, between her own travels and the steady rhythm of the hermitage, was not always easy to reach. And when she did respond, the answer was the same each time: just come. The way a relative might say it. Stop asking so many questions and get in the car.
That kind of invitation takes years to earn. Ryan Kim, Kim'C Market's founder, has known Jeong Kwan for some time — crossing paths in Korea and abroad, connected by a shared conviction that the best Korean food deserves to be known beyond its borders. They have supported each other's work in both directions: Ryan bringing Korean food culture to international audiences, Jeong Kwan extending her practice into the world and occasionally letting the world into her kitchen. The Culinary Odyssey exists, in part, because of relationships like this one — the kind that turns a visit to a Buddhist hermitage into something closer to coming home.
We had barely set down our bags when we were already in the kitchen.
Hands First, Questions Later
Along one counter in Chunjinam's kitchen, a small step stool sat in front of the stove — a practical concession to a small woman who will not let the height of a countertop slow her down. She stepped onto it without ceremony and began to cook.
Spread across the prep table were the morning's harvest: shoots and young leaves gathered from the garden and the surrounding hillside at exactly the right moment. Dureup — Korean aralia shoots, bitter and bright. Eomnamunun — the spring shoots of castor aralia, a thorny highland tree in the same family as dureup. Jepi — Korean pepper tree leaves, fragrant with something between citrus and pepper. Each picked just before it toughens into something less. Jeong Kwan noted this simply: another day and they would be inedible. We had good timing.
At Chunjinam, the rule is unspoken but immediate: if you want to eat, you work first. No exceptions for guests. We gathered around the prep table, and Jeong Kwan sorted alongside us — her hands moving through the stems and leaves as she identified each one, explained what it was, where it grew, when to pick it. Questions were answered mid-motion, without slowing down.
Temple food — the centuries-old vegetarian tradition of Korean Buddhist monasteries — works from a constraint that becomes, in Jeong Kwan's hands, a kind of liberation. No meat. None of the five pungent alliums: garlic, green onions, wild chives, leeks, asafoetida. What remains is what the season gives, fermentation deepens, and attention transforms. Her ganjang (Korean soy sauce), brewed from soybeans she grew herself, is nine years old. Her vinegar, made from vegetables, is eleven.
When the herbs were cleaned and portioned, cooking began. There was no recipe in sight. A fistful of blanched chwinamul — mountain aster greens — went into a bowl with a measure of nine-year ganjang, a pour of omija-cheong (five-flavor berry syrup), a scatter of sesame. No scale. No reference point. Someone asked what the ratio was.
My decision, she said. And moved on.
Precision without measurement is still precision — it is just precision that has moved past the need to be written down. She tasted at every step — and passed the spoon. Every sauce, every seasoned batch went around the table. This is how you learn, she said. Not by watching. By tasting.
When she was cooking, she did not want conversation. The ingredients deserve full attention, she explained. And so, frankly, does she.
Every Stem, Every Drop
The sorting had left a pile of off-cuts: the lower stems of shoots, the fibrous ends of roots, the trimmed bases that most kitchens would discard without a second thought. Jeong Kwan stopped us.
Each piece was examined again. What could be trimmed further was trimmed. What couldn't be eaten would be laid flat in the sun to dry, then simmered later into stock. Nothing from a living thing, she said, should leave without having served its purpose. The ingredient has a role. It came from somewhere. It is owed that much.
She did the same with the mushrooms. The shiitake for her signature dish — braised in ganjang, perilla oil, and joocheong (rice malt syrup) until each cap turns lacquered and deep — had been sun-dried for nearly a week and soaked overnight before cooking. The soaking liquid was not discarded. It went into the braise. The mushroom gave twice.
The table was full — more dishes than expected, each one plated in Jeong Kwan's own hand and on her own terms. Nothing was arranged for effect, and yet everything was considered: a coriander flower from the garden pressed against the edge of a bowl, a scatter of black sesame across pale root vegetables. The garnishes came from whatever was growing that day. The plating was quiet and precise in the same way her cooking was — not sparse, but uncluttered, each dish complete in itself without needing to announce it. What supported it all was not a long list of seasonings but a short one. A nine-year ganjang. An eleven-year vinegar. Cheongs — fermented fruit syrups — pressed from omija and maesil (Korean plum). Not layered over the food but underneath it, holding it up from below. The balance was exact. Nothing more than what each ingredient needed, and nothing less.
Before eating, Jeong Kwan struck a small gong and led a recitation: Where did this food come from? I am not worthy of receiving it. I set aside all desire and receive this meal as medicine, to sustain the body on the path to understanding.
By the time the dishes were washed and put away, evening had arrived. Dinner began with Jeong Kwan's signature: shiitake mushrooms braised low and slow in ganjang and perilla oil, finished with joocheong until each cap turned dark and lacquered — deeply savory, with a sweetness that arrived only at the end. The rest of the table followed the same logic as the morning: bottle gourd, okra, asparagus, green beans, ingredients recognizable anywhere. The point was never the provenance. The point was the attention.
The meal ended with noodles, served in a broth that had been simmering quietly in the background all afternoon. The stock had been drawn from the stems and trimmings set aside during the morning's prep — the pieces laid out to dry, the ones that had been given a second look before anything was discarded. They had become the broth. The liquid was clear and clean and tasted, faintly and unmistakably, of the mountain. In Korea, slurping noodles at the end of a long meal is not a lapse in manners. It is the sound of satisfaction. The room was full of it.
Afterward, she brewed coffee — ground beans from Coffee Bean, which is what she asks visitors to bring if they want to bring anything at all. That way there's enough to share with everyone at the table.
Eighteen Years in a Cup
Later that night, she brought out a pu-erh tea she had been aging for eighteen years and poured it herself.
The cha-dam — the tea conversation — is where a different register of her emerged. Not softer, exactly. More expansive.
On cooking without hesitation: she said she already knows. Not from training — she has none in any formal sense — but from something that precedes this life. She does not deliberate. The moment passes if you think too long. You have to cook with energy, in real time, without stopping for doubt. It is a battleground, she said, and the cook is the one who makes peace from it.
On identity: she is not a chef. Not an artisan. She is a practitioner, and her object of practice happens to be food. To interrupt her in the kitchen is to interrupt a conversation between her and the ingredients. This is why she calls for silence. This is why, earlier that afternoon, she had spoken sharply to the women assisting her — briefly, specifically, then done. Not anger. The same attention she gives everything else: this is right, that is not, here is what needs to change.
Some of those women have been with her for thirty years, she said. The ones who stayed are the ones who could receive.
On food's strange democracy: one flavor has to satisfy a hundred different palates, and those hundred palates have to be brought into one. This is what makes cooking inexhaustible to her — that self-expression and selflessness happen simultaneously, in the same bowl.
It was past dark when we finally rose to leave. The mountain path we had walked up that morning was now invisible under tree cover. Jeong Kwan — without being asked, apparently unconcerned about the hour — got into her car and drove us back down herself. The night path is dangerous, she said. As if this were obvious.
In the morning, she made black sesame porridge. She packed jars of her doenjang (Korean fermented soybean paste) and nine-year ganjang and dried radish. She said goodbye, then said: why are you leaving. Stay another day.
We didn't. But she drove us to our next destination too, navigating the mountain roads at her own pace before turning back up the hill. A nun who has fed the world's most celebrated chefs, cooked at Yale, been called a philosopher by the New York Times — and still made sure no one walked home alone in the dark.
Gangdan is a Korean word that means something like conviction, or backbone — the willingness to hold a position without flinching. Most people encounter Jeong Kwan's gentleness first. It is real. So is the other thing. In her case, they are not separate qualities. They are the same quality, expressed in two different rooms.
FAQ
What is temple food?
Temple food, or sachal eumsik, is the vegetarian culinary tradition of Korean Buddhist monasteries — one of the oldest and most refined plant-based food traditions in the world. It excludes meat and the five pungent alliums (garlic, green onions, wild chives, leeks, and asafoetida), centering instead on seasonal vegetables, fermentation, and careful technique. In Jeong Kwan's practice, it also excludes any ingredient she did not grow or forage herself.
Where is Chunjinam?
Chunjinam is a small hermitage within the grounds of Baekyangsa Temple, located in South Jeolla Province in the southwestern part of the Korean peninsula. From Seoul's Yongsan Station, the KTX high-speed train reaches Jeongeup — the nearest city — in just under two hours. Baekyangsa itself is set inside Naejangsan National Park and is well known for its autumn foliage and the Ssanggyeru pavilion reflected in the surrounding pond.
Can visitors experience Jeong Kwan's cooking?
Visits to Chunjinam are not walk-in. A cooking or temple food experience with Jeong Kwan requires advance arrangement, and availability is limited. Baekyangsa also offers a separate templestay program for those who want to spend time within the monastery more broadly — a worthwhile experience on its own terms.
What did Jeong Kwan mean when she said she is not a chef?
She means it precisely. Jeong Kwan describes herself as a practitioner — a Buddhist nun for whom cooking is a form of meditation, not a profession. Her refusal of the label is not modesty; it reflects a genuine distinction between technical skill, which she has in formidable abundance, and the purpose behind it. She is not cooking to demonstrate mastery. She is cooking because it is how she practices.
How can I experience this with Kim'C Market?
The Culinary Odyssey to Korea is a private, small-group journey built on years of direct relationships with Korea's most respected food makers. The day at Chunjinam is one stop on a week-long journey that also includes time with a National Kimchi Master, a fifth-generation tea grower, a traditional ceramics workshop, and Master Ki Soon-do's fermented sauce estate — among others. The program runs twice a year. Full details at kimcmarket.com.