(Photo by MOOAA/courtesy of haps Magazine Korea)
Ingredients change. Guests change. Neighborhoods change. The way people discover restaurants changes. Even the meaning of a “special meal” shifts over time.
At MOOAA, a 14-seat seasonal kaiseki restaurant in Sinsa, Seoul, our answer has been not to resist those changes, but to build the restaurant around them.
Our dining room has ten counter seats and one table for four. There is no large kitchen brigade, and no menu designed to remain unchanged for years. Instead, the course follows the seasons — and, more specifically, the traditional 24 solar terms that divide the year into smaller transitions.
The four seasons are easy to recognize. Twenty-four seasons require more attention. Early September, for example, is not quite summer and not quite autumn. The days may still be warm, but the evenings are cooler. Fresh figs and new chestnuts begin to appear, mushrooms become more expressive, and seafood slowly takes on a different character.
For a chef, these brief transitions are often more interesting than the obvious seasons.
Kaiseki is usually associated with Japan, particularly Kyoto, but cooking kaiseki in Seoul creates a different starting point.
Rather than trying to reproduce Japan exactly, I use the structure, restraint and seasonal logic of Japanese cuisine together with ingredients that make sense here and now. Korean seafood, vegetables and fruit naturally become part of the course alongside Japanese ingredients and techniques.
That relationship is especially clear in early autumn. Seasonal fish may be lightly marinated in yuan-style seasoning, grilled, and paired with yuzu miso and crisp sweet potato. Fresh figs can sit beside a tofu-and-sesame preparation, with new chestnuts adding a dry, nutty contrast. A hassun course may bring together pumpkin, octopus, fried cutlassfish wrapped with mushrooms, bottarga and pressed mackerel sushi, arranging several small tastes of the season in one composition.
Later in the meal, freshly cooked rice may be served with grilled freshwater eel and soft dashimaki tamago. The flavors are comforting, but the point is not luxury for its own sake. Each dish is meant to belong to a particular moment in the year.
None of these dishes is intended to become a permanent signature. When an ingredient stops tasting right for that particular moment, the dish disappears. That temporariness is one of the things I value most about seasonal cooking.
In kaiseki, seasonality is not expressed only through ingredients. The plate, flowers, branches, ceramics and even the empty space around a dish can help tell the same story.
At MOOAA, the clearest example is our hassun. Traditionally, hassun brings several small seasonal preparations together. For us, it has gradually become something closer to a small landscape.
Food is arranged with vessels, objects, seasonal flowers and plants so that guests encounter the season visually before tasting it. The intention is not simply to make the table decorative. A beautiful presentation without a connection to the food quickly becomes meaningless.
The difficult part is finding the point where the ingredients, vessels and surrounding objects feel as if they belong to the same moment. Sometimes that means the dry, muted colors of early autumn. At another time, it can mean the brightness and moisture of early summer. A few weeks later, it changes again.
The dining room follows the same idea.
For several years, MOOAA has also operated a rotating art program called Craft Archive. Roughly every two months, works by a different artist are introduced into the restaurant. Ceramics, paintings and objects appear around the counter and dining room, changing the atmosphere without turning the restaurant into a conventional gallery.
We are currently presenting the 28th chapter of the series, featuring artist Choi Suk Jae.
For me, the exhibitions are not separate from the restaurant. They affect how the room feels, how the tableware is seen and sometimes even how I think about the presentation of a dish. A guest who returns after several months may therefore find not only a different menu, but a different room.
That has gradually become part of MOOAA’s identity.
When I opened MOOAA eight years ago, I thought mostly about food. Today I think much more about rhythm.
A restaurant has its own rhythm: the seasons, the ingredients arriving at the market, the energy of the team, the guests sitting at the counter, and the city outside.
Sinsa and Garosu-gil have changed considerably during those eight years. Seoul’s dining culture has changed as well. Guests now discover restaurants differently, travel differently and arrive with access to far more information than they once did.
International visitors have also become an increasingly important part of Seoul’s dining scene. For that reason, we provide English service and explain not only what each dish contains, but also why a particular ingredient or presentation belongs to that moment in the Korean season.
Food can be one of the easiest ways to understand a place. A guest may not know the term Baekro — one of the traditional solar terms associated with the first coolness of early autumn and morning dew — but they can understand the transition through a warm bowl, an autumn mushroom, a new chestnut, or the shift from the brighter flavors of summer toward something deeper and warmer.
That is ultimately what I hope a seasonal restaurant can do: not simply serve a sequence of dishes, but allow someone to experience a small piece of time in Seoul.
Eight years later, MOOAA is still only fourteen seats. The restaurant has changed many times, and it will continue to change. For a restaurant built around the seasons, I think that is exactly the point.
English service is available at MOOAA, making the intimate 14-seat Seoul kaiseki restaurant accessible to both Korean and international diners.
