First Look: At Gaon, an Ex-Nobu Chef Makes Traditional Korean Dishes the Hard Way

At Gaon Gamasot Gomtang on Koornang Road, Carnegie’s bustling food hub, husband-and-wife team Hyunjin Kim and Kyung Lee serve the kind of Korean food that seems deceptively easy. “It’s simple things, but it’s harder to get right because it’s time-consuming … it looks easy and like I’m doing nothing,” says Kim.

Soup is at the centre of the menu, made using two giant 240-litre gamasots (cauldrons) shipped directly from South Korea. They were hard to source, harder to move and, Kim says, have made the end result taste purer and more traditional.

The “deeply personal Korean cuisine”, as Kim describes it, is made without shortcuts. “We don’t use MSG,” Lee says. “It’s all about our very clean soup.” Gomtang (Korean beef soup) is made with beef and water, simmered for four to five hours, finished with ginger and ginseng. Seolleongtang has a deeper flavour and is made from beef bones and water and cooked over two days. Bowls are served with wheat noodles, sliced beef and spring onion.

There’s also jangeotang, an eel soup Kim says he’s never seen on a menu in Australia. Freshwater eel is flown in live from Tasmania every Thursday and Kim collects it directly from the airport.

One of Gaon’s few non-broth-based dishes is its Eonyang bulgogi, a charcoal-grilled mix of Wagyu and Angus. There are also two spicy dishes, added after Lee, who runs front-of-house, pushed for some serious gochujang heat on the menu: a stir-fried oxtail, and a charcoal-grilled beef tripe and tendon dish topped with shaved onion and cabbage, Chinese chives, rocket and perilla leaves.

Drinks are simple: a pumpkin sikhe (Korean fermented rice punch) and beer on tap, including Cass and Asahi. 

Kim has been building towards this restaurant for most of his life. “Unofficially, I started cooking at 13 years old,” he says, when he made breadcrumbs by hand for his mother’s restaurant in South Korea. He trained formally at culinary school there, worked at a hotel on Jeju Island, then spent five years at the Westin Josun Seoul. He then studied at the Culinary Institute of America, and later worked in Melbourne at the Grand Hyatt and Crown’s No 8 before joining Nobu’s cruise ship restaurant Silk Road (since renamed Umi Umi).

Eventually, he stepped away from the kitchen to focus on family life. “You don’t see sun outside the building when you’re a chef," he says of the work hours. But after working in construction, the pull of cooking returned, and Gaon is the result. The name translates as the “core of the world”. “I want to be the core of Korean cuisine. Authentic Korean cuisine in Melbourne.” 

The restaurant has struck a chord with older diners, particularly Koreans who grew up with soups like these. “Fifty-year-old Korean customers bring their older family members. They sit down, share food, eat soups – it’s exactly what I wanted.”

Gaon Gamasot Gomtang
Shop 2/23 Koornang Road, Carnegie
(03) 9022 8282

Hours:
Mon to Sat 10am–10pm

@gaon_gamasot