INTERVIEW How memory shapes food at Singapore's Michelin-starred restaurant Meta

Chef Sun Kim, the head chef of Meta Restaurant in Singapore / Courtesy of Meta Restaurant

By Pyo Kyung-min

• Published Jan 28, 2026 12:00 PM KST
• Updated Jan 28, 2026 6:15 PM KST

SINGAPORE — At Meta Restaurant, dinner begins before you recognize it as Korean.

The first clue arrives quietly, not with kimchi or gochujang, but with temperature. A dish meant to be warm arrives unmistakably warm. A sauce carrying the sea tastes of a winter coast, deep and composed. Nothing declares intent, yet the food does ask the diner to pay attention.

By the time "gyeran jjim," a Korean steamed egg custard, arrives with smooth fish milt sourced from Japan’s Hokkaido and a sauce reminiscent of "haemultang," the often spicy Korean seafood stew, the recognition has already settled in.

Nothing on the table at Meta announces itself outright, yet by the end of the meal, the flavors carry the weight of memory, unmistakable but difficult to name.

That recognition had begun earlier that afternoon, during a conversation with Meta's chef Sun Kim, even before dinner was served, on Jan. 21.

Meta is a two-Michelin-star fine dining restaurant in Singapore, known for tasting menus that resist easy classification. Led by Kim, the Korean-born chef-owner, the restaurant draws loosely from Korean cuisine while moving freely across techniques, seasons and forms.

“The moment you decide your cooking as ‘Korean,’ your range becomes smaller,” Kim said during an interview with The Korea Times at his restaurant. “Too many rules come with that label. I don’t want to cook with certain rules in my head.”

The ambiguity, according to Kim, is intentional. It is the product of decades spent cooking across borders and of a philosophy refined through repetition.

Meta began in 2015 at a small space on Singapore’s Keong Saik Road. Two moves later, the restaurant’s name, borrowed from the word “metamorphosis,” reads more like a working principle — Kim prefers his cooking and restaurant not to stand still.

“I don’t believe in perfection,” he said. “I believe in the process of getting closer to it. Restaurants should change, just like people.”

That philosophy equally runs through the meal. Elements of Korean cuisine surfaces in fragments, through instinct rather than form. The tasting menu follows a structure Kim rarely alters, beginning in the water and ending on land, even as the details shift with the four seasons.

Seafood dishes, including abalone from Jeju Island and samchi (seerfish), arrived with clarity rather than excess. Textures were handled with precision, clean but never not savory. The meat courses followed, from duck to wagyu, smooth yet substantial, their depth built not on novelty but on familiarity.

Nothing demanded to be identified as Korean. That, Kim explained, is precisely the point.

“At the beginning, maybe only 10 or 20 percent of the menu felt Korean,” he said. “Now it’s closer to 50 percent.”

The shift came not from strategy but from appetite. “As I got older, I started cooking the food I actually wanted to eat,” he said.

Those instincts trace back to southeastern port city of Busan. Kim was born near Busan Station, a place shaped by transit, markets and the sea. Seafood was not a luxury but a daily presence. His mother ran a restaurant and many of his childhood friends came from families who did the same. Kitchens were not dreams, but ordinary spaces.

“It didn’t feel like a big decision,” Kim said of becoming a chef. “It felt natural.”

After training in Korea, Kim worked in Australia and Japan before arriving in Singapore through a Japanese chef he admired. Singapore became his home. He married, settled and eventually opened Meta, a move that came with challenges he did not anticipate.

“The first year was the hardest,” he said. “I knew how to cook. I didn’t know how to run a restaurant.”

The learning curve was steep. Finding his own culinary voice took time. Kim describes himself as a chef who needed to try many things before understanding what mattered.

“Some chefs decide very early what kind of food they want to cook,” he said. “They grow fast, but narrow. I went slower, but learned more.”

Years passed before Meta’s direction felt clear. Recognition arrived soon after, when the restaurant earned its first Michelin star in 2017. A second followed in 2024. The accolades, Kim said, were affirming but not transformative.

“It was overwhelming,” he said. “But it gave me confidence. It told me I wasn’t going the wrong way.”

Even then, Michelin stars were never the destination. At Meta, success is measured less by stars than by return visits. The aim is not perfection, but completeness.

“I don’t think about being the best restaurant,” Kim said. “I think about being a place people want to return to.”

Dinner that evening seemed to embody that approach. The pacing was unhurried. Courses arrived with a quiet logic. Desserts — creme fraiche made with Jeju tangerine and mont blanc chestnut cake paired with doenjang (fermented soybean paste) ice cream — came as a calm sequence rather than a finishing blow, measured in sweetness and lingering longer than expected. The wine pairing moved alongside the menu with similar restraint, designed to support rather than overshadow.

That balance appears to resonate in Singapore. Roughly 70 percent of Meta’s diners are locals, drawn to a dining culture shaped by variety. In a city where Chinese, Malay and Indian cuisines intersect daily, diners tend to move easily between traditions, guided less by labels than by appetite.

Kim sees the growing interest in Korean food as something organic, strengthened by years of exposure in pop culture and global media. He points to the runaway popularity of shows like "Culinary Class Wars," which showcased the skill of Korean chefs and drew international acclaim.

“People watch Korean dramas, movies, shows,” he said. “They see Korean food in media and want to try it.”

Still, he resists the idea of representing anything beyond his own work. There is no talk of carrying a national banner, no attempt to position Meta as an ambassador of Korean cuisine.

“I’m not carrying a flag,” Kim said. “I’m just cooking what I believe in.”

What he does carry, instead, is responsibility. Kitchen work, he noted, leaves little room for indifference.

“Technique matters, but attitude matters more,” he said. “This job is hard. If you don’t care, it shows on the plate.”

When asked what he hopes guests take away from a meal at Meta, Kim did not hesitate.

“That it was delicious. That they felt satisfied,” he said.

He paused briefly, then added, almost as an afterthought, “And maybe that it reminded them of something they couldn’t immediately name.”