Kitchen Genome: Seoul’s chef family tree

Great restaurants train great cooks, and many of them go on to open places of their own. Kitchen Genome follows those paths: which chefs worked at Seoul’s most acclaimed kitchens, and where they cook now.

If you loved a tasting menu at a MICHELIN-starred restaurant, the chef who ran its kitchen line may now serve a smaller, more affordable menu across town. We track 51 restaurants (44 in Seoul) tied to 13 origin kitchens. Every link cites a public source, such as the MICHELIN Guide, press interviews or the restaurant’s own channels, and shows when we last checked it. Where a restaurant has not yet confirmed a detail, we say so.

Browse all restaurants Open the interactive lineage map (Korean)

Start from a kitchen you know

How to read it

Names use the restaurant’s or chef’s official English form where we found one (MICHELIN Guide, the restaurant’s site or Instagram). Some follow the spelling used in English-language press or guides. Otherwise Korean words use Revised Romanization, marked “romanized”, and loanwords get a plain English spelling, marked “transliterated”. Roles and dates come from the cited sources; “not confirmed” means we could not find them yet.