“Achieving harmony and balance is everything in life, definitely,” laughs chef, cookbook writer, television personality, and restaurant owner Judy Joo. Her life demonstrates her commitment to these qualities, from her career choices to the cuisine she is known for popularizing worldwide.
Joo is best known for making Korean cuisine familiar and accessible to Westerners. In her cookbooks, she teaches cooks to become more confident using Korean ingredients. On popular American programs like the “Wendy Williams Show,” she demonstrates how Korean flavors can be used in flexible and modern ways. In her own cooking show, “Korean Food Made Simple,” she uses a mix of traditional and modern recipes to educate and encourage Westerners to try Korean cuisine.
Joo is so in love with cooking, so comfortable in her role as chef, and so invested in the hospitality industry, that it may be surprising to learn that her career started very differently. With an engineering degree from Columbia University, Joo worked in finance before she came to cooking. When she decided to change her path, Joo trained as a pastry chef at the French Culinary Institute, now the International Culinary Center, in New York.
“When I came out of the FCI, I kept feeling that I really wanted to cook more from the heart,” says Joo. And so, she began to specialize in Korean cooking. Changing her career from finance to food, and changing her focus from pastry to savory, reveals Joo’s instinctive drive to find balance between her education and her hobbies, her passion, and her job.
Harmony is at the center of Korean culture and Korean food. “If you look at Korea’s flag, you see the yin-yang in the middle,” says Joo. “It’s all about balance and harmony.” She explains that these qualities inform the way people eat: “It’s the whole ethos of the cuisine.”
Traditionally, Koreans were ruled by the philosopher class. Therefore, says Joo, Korean food culture has a very holistic point of view where “food is seen as medicine, period.” For Koreans, the body, mind, and soul are nurtured by the food they eat and the way they eat it.
“You have to eat the five colors, the five flavors, and the five textures at every single meal,” says Joo. A dish like bibimbap that looks like a color wheel is typical of what you would see on a Korean table.
Another way that Korean food exemplifies balance is the way it is served. On a Korean table, there are lots of little dishes for everyone to share. Joo says that “only Koreans eat this way.” In China, she says, there are lots of large dishes that everybody shares, and in Japan, you get small dishes that are just for you, like the bento box—and “Koreans do both.” All the little dishes on a Korean table have been prepared in different ways, and Koreans believe it is necessary to eat a diverse meal to give the body the essential minerals and nutrients it needs.
Joo’s culinary niche and style also exemplify harmony, balance, and finding a middle way. She says that every chef must find his or her own “voice,” and for her, the Western and Korean influences in her cooking come naturally. “Because I have such strong roots in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, I constantly want to draw inspiration from all my experiences,” she says. In addition, she walks a kind of middle way between traditional and modern recipes and styles.
Trained as a pastry chef, Joo now finds that there is a nice flexibility on the savory side. “Baking has to be exact. But all cooking doesn’t have to be exact like that,” she says. “Cooking is so subjective.” She would like people to learn to cook instinctually, rather than by “just measuring things,” and she says that with practice, people can become more confident and flexible. “I want to help spread Korean flavors all around the world,” she says. “If people embrace just one Korean ingredient and start using it, I consider that a success.”
Switching careers from finance to cooking was a choice made from the heart in an effort to balance passion and experience. Joo has always loved cooking; she says that, from very early on, she just wanted to read cookbooks and cooking magazines in her spare time. “I would read cookbooks before bed, like they were fiction,” she laughs. “It was a serious hobby. I absolutely loved it. I didn’t love finance. I decided that enough was enough, and life’s too short.”
Despite the personal upheaval caused by the dramatic switch in her career, Joo sees a coherence and balance in the way her experiences have directed her path. “I believe one of the reasons I’ve had success in a relatively short period of time is because I had so much other experience that may seem random, but was actually quite applicable,” she says.
Number one, she says, is her engineering experience. “It really lends itself to the kitchen because the kitchen is a laboratory,” she says. Joo has a degree in operations research and industrial engineering, and says “the entire thing is about efficiency design when you’re trying to design restaurants.” Second, being in finance has been extremely helpful: “When you’re running restaurants, you’re running a business, and you’re going to close if you can’t make your profits and losses work out.”
Nothing in her life is wasted. “I do have such a strong education,” muses Joo. “I found myself in a position where I could write a recipe and work with an editor, and deliver something on the first go that needed very little editing; I could read a teleprompter on the first try; I could come up with witty commentary; I have richness of vocabulary when it comes to describing food.” Joo has found that being immersed in different industries has proven very helpful.
The hospitality industry has suffered badly during the pandemic. Surviving between profit and loss, between open and closed, has been challenging. But here, too, Joo has found a way forward that emphasizes balance. “Oh my gosh, the pandemic,” she exclaims. “I’ve opened two restaurants during the pandemic, and I’m opening up a third soon.” Joo had to open and close her first restaurant four times because the mall in which it is located kept opening and closing.
Nonetheless, through extended periods of zero revenue, Joo decided to keep her staff at full salary for as long as possible. “We made the decision to pay everybody 100 percent of their salary anyway, so we paid everybody just to sit at home,” she says; it wasn’t possible for the last few months of the most recent closure, but she says that everyone still got 80 percent of their pay. She felt this was the right thing to do, and it demonstrates her values.
Joo has taken risks, made bold decisions, and faced the possibility of failure so that she could live a dream. In the food she brings to the table, and on the path she has taken to get there, Joo exemplifies the qualities of harmony and balance that she finds so important to living a good life.
