Dining in

Cooking for six in Cockatoo

Featured in

  • Published 20250204
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-04-3
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook. PDF

In 2019, a tiny, six-seat restaurant in a one-bedroom Brunswick apartment swiftly became one of Melbourne’s most sought-after dining experiences. With its degustation menu of traditionally prepared Korean cuisine and its uniquely cosy surrounds, CHAE soon had a string of awards and a waitlist of more than 8,000 people. Four years on, the business may have relocated – chef Jung Eun Chae and her partner, restaurant manager Yoora Yoon, moved to the Victorian town of Cockatoo in 2022, where they now run CHAE from their house in the mountains – but its guiding principles remain the same: to make guests feel at home as they experience the dynamism of Korean cuisine and culture. In this interview with Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver, Chae shares her story of culinary connection.

CARODY CULVER: Where did you grow up in South Korea, and what are your most enduring memories of the food you ate when you were a child?

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

About the author

Jung Eun Chae

Originally from South Korea, Jung Eun Chae, formerly of Cutler & Co., launched CHAE in late 2019 from her apartment in Melbourne’s north. In...

More from this edition

The pool

Fiction I CATCH THE school bus home most days, kids kangarooing from seat to seat. Hard for a little bloke like me to get a...

No secret passageway

Non-fictionIn 2001 I read an article in The Guardian newspaper about a man who fell from the sky, landing in a superstore car park not far from where I live in London. The article, by journalists Esther Addley and Rory McCarthy, detailed how the Metropolitan Police discovered the dead man’s identity through a combination of luck, Interpol and British-Pakistani community workers. Muhammad Ayaz had managed to slip through security at Bahrain airport, run across the tarmac and, according to witnesses on the plane, disappear beneath the wing of the British Airways Boeing 777. The article quotes a spokesman from the International Air Transport Association: a myth circulates that there is a ‘secret hatch from the wheel bay into the cargo bay, and then into the passenger cabin, as if it were a castle with a dungeon and a series of secret passageways’. No such passageway exists and Muhammad would have found himself trapped in the wheel bay with no oxygen, no heating and no air pressure as well as no way out. If he wasn’t crushed or burned by the retracting wheels, he may have frozen to death once the flight reached 30,000 feet, finally falling out hours later when the plane lowered its landing gear as it prepared to touch down at Heathrow.

Interstitial

Non-fictionAmerican sociologists John and Ruth Hill Useem first coined the term ‘third culture kid’ in the 1950s to describe the experience of Americans who were raised abroad in a culture different to their birth culture. This term reflects the way children raised overseas straddle three cultures: the culture of their birth, the culture within which they are raised, and a third, nebulous culture – the culture they create through the way they learn to relate to each other. The third culture is interstitial, not an amalgam. ‘Third culture kid’ (TCK) is a term often used as shorthand. Many TCKs will have experienced more than one cultural shift too. Those with diplomatic, military or missionary families are often raised in multiple countries, and others, like me, will continue their travels overseas as adults too, exercising the global and economic mobility they know well.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.