Kochi – Hell's Kitchen reinvents the Korean skewer

On the corner of Tenth Avenue and West 46th Street, a few blocks from Broadway's marquees, Kochi takes its name from the Korean word for skewer — and builds an entire tasting menu around the idea that street food and royal-court cooking can share a plate. It is Chef Sungchul Shim's first solo restaurant, opened in Hell's Kitchen in November 2019 after years spent cooking at Le Bernardin, Per Se, Morimoto and Neta in Greenwich Village. The room is small: a dining area in dark wood and earth tones, an open kitchen, and a marble counter where most of the drama happens in full view of the diners. It holds one MICHELIN Star, recognition for a kitchen that treats the humble skewer — kochi in Korean — with the same precision Shim once brought to French and Japanese fine dining. The eight-course menu moves from delicate raw preparations to a riot of textures in the closing bibimbap, a structure that rewards attention without ever feeling formal or heavy.

01The room and the setting

Kochi occupies a narrow footprint on Tenth Avenue, and its character is set by the counter: a slab of white marble facing directly into the open kitchen, where the cooking itself becomes part of the room's decoration. The dining area beyond is finished in dark wood and warm, earth-toned surfaces, a deliberately understated backdrop for food that does the talking.

Diners who book the counter get a close-up view of the pass — plates assembled course by course just inches away — while the small dining room offers a quieter, more private version of the same tasting menu.

02The chef

Sungchul Shim was born and raised in Jeollanam-do, the South Korean province where he first learned to cook in his family's kitchen for large gatherings and parties. He went on to work in some of New York's most demanding dining rooms — Le Bernardin, Per Se, Morimoto — before taking charge of the kitchen at Neta in Greenwich Village.

Insider tip

Open nightly for dinner; tasting menu $145; book via OpenTable or phone ahead.

Kochi, opened late in 2019, was his first project as his own chef-owner, and it set the template he has since carried into two further Hell's Kitchen restaurants, Mari and Gui Steakhouse, both built on the same instinct for marrying Korean flavour with technique learned in French kitchens.

03The cooking

The tasting menu runs to eight courses, sometimes extended with a supplementary abalone course, and the kitchen describes it as an homage to Korean royal cuisine filtered through the accessibility of street food. Seasonal ingredients move through a sequence the restaurant calls a series of jewel-like dishes, each course built to show a different side of Korean fine dining — from the clean, delicate flavours of a hwe-style raw course through to the deliberate collision of textures in the closing bibimbap.

Dishes on the current Chef's Signature Menu include squid with macadamia, edamame and dasima oil; fluke dressed with maesil, perilla, minari and pear; and a halibut kochi served in a jiri consommé with radish jorim and cabbage — proof that the skewer format can carry both subtlety and heat.

04What to order

The signature menu builds through an octopus kochi with celtuce, curry aioli and crispy potato, then a duck steak paired with a namul pie, king oyster mushroom and cucumber kimchi — available with an A5 Wagyu upgrade for those who want to push the course further.

The tuna bibimbap, built on blue fin tuna, kimchi marmalade and seaweed rice, can be finished with sea urchin or Scottish langoustine as an add-on, and the menu closes on two desserts: a strawberry and apple course with milk and candied mint, and a black sesame course layering black sesame ice cream, matcha cream and puffed black rice.

05Wine, booking and the neighbourhood

The tasting menu is priced at $145, with a beverage pairing at $110 in October 2026. Kochi is open for dinner seven nights a week, Monday to Thursday and Sunday from 5pm to 9.30pm, Friday and Saturday until 10pm; reservations are taken on OpenTable or by phone, and the kitchen asks for at least a day's notice for most dietary adjustments, though it cannot accommodate vegan or celiac diets.

The address sits in Hell's Kitchen, a short walk from the theatres of Broadway, in a stretch of Tenth Avenue that Shim has since built on with two more restaurants of his own — Mari a few blocks north and Gui Steakhouse — turning this single corner into something of a small, personal neighbourhood of Korean cooking.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.