Lee makes it work because the majority of the prep takes place during daytime hours, when the team can spread out across the handful of dining tables for enough counterspace to ready the weekly batches of kimchee and a rotating list of other components - the $23 banchan platter contains six items- all marinated on a specific schedule. "Everything tastes better on the third day," Lee says, before stopping herself. "Maybe not the potato salad."
For someone whose name is now synonymous with banchan, Lee was a relative latecomer to it, having grown up in a Boston suburb with her Korean father and her adopted mother eating 'super American.' Then, at 21, she moved to New York, and 'all of a sudden it was like, I wanna be Korean so badly.' As she (re)discovered Korean cooking, she started learning specific dishes through Maangchi's Youtube channel and gradually incorporated her own sensibility into the craft before Banchan by Sunny's first pop-up in 2015.
"Starting to cook Korean food was the thing that I have never ever gotten tired of," she says. "There's nothing else I want to do in the world." This passion drove Lee to open her first restaurant, Sunn's, a banchan-and-wine bar, following her successful pop-up experience which began almost a decade prior.
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