Don’t cross Culinary Class Wars star Anh Sung-jae, the only three-Michelin-starred chef in Seoul

SEOUL – On an early episode of Netflix’s hit reality cooking show

Culinary Class Wars

(2024), chef Anh Sung-jae stood in a warehouse filled with makeshift cooking stations and considered the plate in front of him: a rainbow palette of handmade pastas, purees and delicately cooked seafood. On top was a smattering of flower petals.

A judge on the show, he praised how the contestant had put together an elaborate dish and handled everything perfectly – almost.

“I don’t know why you chose to put flowers on top of such a gorgeous pasta,” he said to the crestfallen participant.

“I hate putting useless stuff on dishes just to make them look prettier,” Anh said later. “What he did was add something that had no flavour and no use.”

Anh is chef and owner of Mosu, South Korea’s only three-Michelin-starred restaurant, where his exacting and uncompromising standards have served him well. Yet, despite reaching the pinnacle of the culinary world, he was not a household name in the country.

When he was introduced as a judge, a handful of contestants whispered to one another: “Who’s that?”

That is no longer the case. He has risen to TV fame as a hard-to-impress and ruthlessly unsentimental judge on Culinary Class Wars, which features 100 contestants from all corners of the culinary world.

But the breakout star was Anh, 42, and now, he is everywhere.

He had a prime-time interview on one of the country’s most prominent news programmes. He starred in commercials for Subway sandwiches. And in a nod to his growing celebrity, he was lampooned in a sketch on South Korea’s version of Saturday Night Live – capturing his form-fitting, plum-coloured suit and his tendency to sprinkle English into his Korean sentences.

It has been a remarkable homecoming for Anh, who emigrated to the United States with his family as a teenager almost three decades ago, settling in Southern California. He helped at his parents’ Chinese restaurant, but he did not have much interest in the kitchen.

Instead of going to college, he enlisted in the US Army after high school with dreams of travelling the world. After the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, he asked to be sent to Iraq. Anh was stationed in Baghdad, where he fuelled helicopters and tanks.

When it came time to sign up for another tour of duty, he decided to put down a deposit at a training programme to become a mechanic for Porsches. But one day, he said, after a group of culinary school students walked by in white chef coats, he finally considered cooking as a profession and enrolled in culinary school.

After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Los Angeles, he worked at Urasawa, a Japanese restaurant in Beverly Hills, frequented by celebrities and once known for serving America’s most expensive sushi and kaiseki-style omakase dinner.

They let him wash dishes after he offered to work for free. Within a month, he was working closely with the chef and owner Hiroyuki Urasawa.

Then in 2008, a customer spoke to Anh in Korean. His name was Corey Lee, and he was a young Korean-American chef leading the kitchen at The French Laundry, a Napa Valley restaurant considered a shrine to high-end establishments. Anh said Urasawa had asked Lee to hire his young protege.

Anh worked at The French Laundry and eventually left to be a chef at Benu, which Lee had started in San Francisco. Both establishments are three-star fixtures in the Michelin guide.

In 2016, Anh opened his first restaurant in San Francisco called Mosu, a play on the Korean pronunciation of cosmos, a flower that grew in a field near his childhood home in South Korea. Mosu offered a tasting menu for US$195 (S$265), a record high for a new restaurant in the city.

Mosu was awarded one Michelin star, an impressive achievement for a new restaurant, and the reservation booking at the 18-seat hideaway was consistently full.

But Amy In, Anh’s wife, said this was a challenging time. They have two children under 12 years old. “He was so stressed,” she recalled. “It was difficult to watch.”

After a year, Anh closed the restaurant to move back to South Korea. “People called me crazy,” he said. His timing was good. Michelin had started publishing its restaurant guide in South Korea, and there was a surge of interest in Korean food and culture.

When Anh opened Mosu in Seoul in 2017, he raised eyebrows by charging 240,000 won (S$220) a person for the tasting menu, topping the city’s previously most expensive multi-course meal by 30 per cent.

His investors told him that he was charging too much. Even his wife had wondered whether Koreans would pay that much for a meal.

Anh was not having it. “This is not too expensive,” he said. “This is the value I set.”

Mosu was initially more of a critical success than a commercial one. It earned its first Michelin star in the 2019 guide, added a second star the next year and finally became a three-star restaurant in 2023 – and remained the lone restaurant in the 2024 guide with that distinction.

In January 2024, Anh suddenly announced that Mosu was temporarily closing in Seoul. In an interview with the newspaper Chosun Daily, he said he had split from CJ Group, a South Korean conglomerate that had invested in Mosu.

“I’m currently working on a new restaurant with a different partner, not a large corporation, that better matches my vision,” he said. It is expected to open in early 2025 in a new location.

But as one door closed, another one opened.

When Kim Hak-min and Kim Eun-ji, producers at Studio Slam which made Culinary Class Wars for Netflix, started interviewing potential judges, Anh was not an obvious fit. He did not have television experience, and some people on the production team did not know who he was. They were concerned that the contestants, many of whom were established chefs, might disregard his judgment.

Yet, Kim Eun-ji recalled Anh saying: “‘If I became a judge, I don’t think you would hear any ifs, ands or buts. Everyone would accept my judgment.’ We were mesmerised by his confidence.”

Culinary Class Wars was Netflix’s top-ranked non-English show for three straight weeks, and it appeared in the top 10 for six straight weeks. It will return for a second season in the second half of 2025, with Anh reprising his role as judge alongside beloved South Korean restaurateur and celebrity chef Paik Jong-won. NYTIMES