Haenyeo – Park Slope's tribute to Jeju's sea women

Haenyeo sits on a corner of Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Fifth Avenue meets Carroll Street, named after the haenyeo of Jeju Island – the free-diving women who hold their breath for two to three minutes at a time while harvesting shellfish and seaweed from depths of thirty to forty feet. The restaurant opened in Park Slope in late 2018, the solo venture of chef and restaurateur Jenny Kwak, who for two decades had already been introducing New Yorkers to Korean cooking through Dok Suni's in the East Village and DoHwa in the West Village, both run with her mother. It holds a Bib Gourmand in the MICHELIN Guide, a distinction it was still carrying for a second consecutive year by July 2021. The cooking is seafood-forward and unapologetically personal: home-style stews and grilled fish sit beside dishes that borrow freely from Mexican and French kitchens, a reflection of a chef cooking for her own palate rather than for nostalgia alone.

01The room and the setting

The dining room is small and bright, with white walls, glass-paned frames and sections of exposed brick that give the corner space a quietly domestic feel rather than the smoke and neon associated with Koreatown rooms uptown. One profile of the restaurant described it as a serene and charming space, its white hues softened by brick and glass. The address itself has a certain poetry to it: 239 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Carroll Street, in the heart of brownstone Park Slope.

02The chef

Jenny Kwak has been cooking Korean food for New Yorkers since long before it was fashionable to do so. She first worked alongside her mother, Myung Ja Kwak, at Dok Suni's in the East Village and later at DoHwa in the West Village, two restaurants widely credited with introducing downtown diners to Korean home cooking decades before the current wave of Korean-American chefs. With Haenyeo, Kwak took sole charge of the kitchen for the first time, co-owning the restaurant with her husband, Terrence Segura. Her mother has largely stepped back from the stoves but, according to reporting on the restaurant, still prepares the kimchi served at the tables.

Insider tip

Open evenings only; booking recommended, especially at weekends.

The James Beard Foundation named her a semifinalist for Best Chef: New York State in 2020, recognition that followed a steady run of attention from New York's dining press since Haenyeo's opening.

03The cooking

Kwak has said that the food at Haenyeo does not try to replicate what is actually eaten on Jeju Island, where the diving women's own diet tends to be raw fish eaten simply, dipped in chilli sauce. Instead, the menu uses the haenyeo's spirit — their endurance, precision and matriarchal pride — as a starting point for dishes that roam further afield. Grilled oysters arrive with seaweed butter and brioche toast; a French-leaning bouillabaisse takes its cue from spicy Korean fish stew; a kimchi chigae thick with tofu and pork belly sits near soondubu jigae and kalbi on the menu. The restaurant's most talked-about dish, the rice cake fundido, pairs chewy tteokbokki rice cakes with gochujang sauce, melted Oaxaca cheese, chorizo and jalapeño — a dish one critic called a deeply comforting, impossible-to-stop-eating plate with a sauce you want to lick from the bowl.

04What to order

Beyond the fundido, regulars point to the hwe dop bop, a cold rice bowl of tuna sashimi, perilla and toasted seaweed; the yache pajun, a zucchini and chilli-scallion pancake; and the crispy spicy yang-yum chicken wings. Sablefish with baby bok choy and deji kalbi (pork short rib) turn up among the mains, while a plate of beignets closes the meal on an unexpected, playful note rather than the more familiar Korean dessert fare.

05The neighbourhood

Haenyeo's corner position places it firmly within residential Park Slope, a neighbourhood of brownstone blocks a short walk from Prospect Park. The restaurant has become something of a local fixture since opening, drawing praise from New York's dining press as one of the more distinctive new openings of its year and a finalist for Eater New York's Restaurant of the Year in 2019.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.