Can never book a table at Na Oh? Try now

SINGAPORE – A table at Korean restaurant Na Oh is now easier to get. The chef behind one of Singapore’s hardest restaurants to book, Corey Lee of three-Michelin-starred Benu in San Francisco, is adding more slots at dinner time.

The 40-seat restaurant at the Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore in Jurong West – a partnership between the chef and the South Korean car manufacturer –

opened in June.

It offers fine Korean food at $78++ a person.

The concept and quality of the food must have resonated with diners here. Its reservation website was soon inundated, and the elegant restaurant housed within a factory became a hot ticket in what has been a tough year for restaurants in Singapore.

Chef Lee, 47, who is in Singapore for the launch of the restaurant’s winter menu, tells The Straits Times: “When we talked about opening this, we never anticipated it being this hard-to-book place. We didn’t want to be that. We wanted to be something that’s very approachable.

“But this is Singapore. Singaporeans love to dine out and we’re really, really grateful and fortunate to have that kind of response.”

He adds that he will do his best to make bookings more accessible because his intended menu is not “the kind we want people to wait months and months for”.

In 2025, he says, the format of the meals at Na Oh will remain the same.

Each season, diners have a choice of three set meals or jinjitsang, each with a different main dish and accompaniments. The four-course meals also come with appetisers, a starter and dessert.

The options are the same at lunch and dinner.

For winter, the choices are grilled Jeju beltfish with altang, a spicy seafood stew with pollock roe and cod milt; galbijjim or beef shortrib braised in aged soya sauce, served with chestnut and thistle rice; and pheasant mandu or dumpling soup with freshly milled rice cakes and seasonal namul or vegetable side dishes.

Menus for summer and autumn have come with a beef, a fish and a chicken or pork option. For winter, the poultry element is pheasant, used as a filling for the dumplings.

Its inclusion on the menu speaks to the chef’s thinking behind the food offerings at the restaurant. He had told ST in a previous interview that Na Oh was about offering “the best versions of traditional food that we imagine”.

He says the game bird used to be part of the repertoire of Korean food, but has fallen off the radar in recent times. The restaurant gets its supply from France.

He says: “I thought about it a lot before deciding to go with this dish because pheasant is not a common bird. Some people think of it as being gamey, but it’s actually not. When it’s fresh, it is a very mild and sweet-tasting bird.

“We wanted the food to be rooted in something traditional. But what is it that is traditional? Is it the idea or is it the actual ingredient? Well, it can be both.

“So, we are trying to offer a dish from the past that we’ve lost over time because of the advent of farming and importing. That’s why I really wanted to do this dish.”

There are no plans, for now, to change the pricing of the meals.

“But to be honest, the costs are very high,” he says. “There is this desire from Hyundai to offer this as an amenity. From its perspective, it’s not the same way that F&B people look at trying to run a small business. I think there needs to be a balance. It needs to be healthy and it needs to be sustainable. We want to continue to offer great value.”