Review: Wonderful Ki Korean Tasting Menu Is Best New Restaurant of 2025

When Ki Kim was outlining dishes for Ki Restaurant, her modern 10-seat Korean tasting menu counter hidden in the basement of Little Tokyo's Kajima building, she knew her meal needed a center of gravity: a middle course to balance the opening parade of seafood appetizers with several heartier, spicier pre-dessert dazzling dishes.

Just before the pandemic, Kim had been a sous chef at Blanca, a now-closed restaurant in Brooklyn run by the people behind pizza icon Roberta's. A raviolo stuffed with 'nduja' had been Blanca's central dish. It was rich in carbohydrates, compact, and satiating without destroying diners' appetites. In his own home, Kim thought, he could achieve these qualities with a bowl of noodles.

It opened in January 2025, and by late spring, Kim and her team had found an ideal, adaptable recipe.

No dish or moment specifically makes Restaurant Ki the best new restaurant opening in Los Angeles in 2025. It's the fluid sum of the meal: two sharp bites of perilla leaf and mint sorbet, the surprise when gochujang and tarragon meet on the palate, the way a smear of doenjang gives sunny beurre blanc a sudden melancholic depth.

Although I never stop thinking about the noodles. They are the best example of how, beyond exciting skill and narrative clarity, Kim achieves the rarest of feats in fine dining: she conveys heart.

Keizo Shimamoto, who ran the short-lived Ramen Shack in San Juan Capistrano and still hosts occasional pop-ups (including for his ramen burgers) in Orange County, supplies custom noodles for Kim. They have the crucial spring, but they also weigh a little more to maintain their texture in concentrated Dungeness crab broth.

A bowl of noodles with concentrated Dungeness crab broth in Ki with Keizo Shimamoto's custom noodles, garnished here with grilled eel.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The aroma of the broth is reminiscent of chawanmushi full of seafood, mineral and electric. Specks of sweet meat spiral through the broth like murky images of the Milky Way. Garnishes vary, but tend toward combinations like sweet and smoky roasted eel, aromatic pine mushrooms, and a teaspoon of caviar. As signifiers of luxury, they will brown without too much distracting from the essential, nutritious goodness of the brothy noodles.

The dish is the centerpiece of a meal that is longer and more elaborate—and certainly more expensive, $300 per person—than the concise tasting menu with which Kim first introduced his cuisine to Los Angeles at the 20-seat Kinn in Koreatown. His signature there paired crispy octopus with silky, funky gochujang aioli, a riff on a marquee dish at New York's pioneering modern Korean restaurant Jungsik, where Kim once worked.

An elaborate $300-per-person meal might include Kim's wild boar dish.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

He was brave enough to try some pretty radical innovations in the Los Angeles neighborhood famous for its traditional Korean cuisine. Kinn had a two-year run, ending at the end of 2023, and Kim discussed the stress and anxiety surrounding its closure with my colleague Stephanie Breijo.

He found immediate support in the chef community and landed jobs at Morihiro and Meteora. Then an unexpected opportunity arose.

A friend of Kim's was a regular customer at Sushi Kaneyoshi, one of the three best omakase counters in the city, and had taken him there for dinner. The friend was chatting with chef-owner Yoshiyuki Inoue about the growing maze of restaurants on this subterranean level of the Kajima building, which already housed Sushi Kaneyoshi and its more casual sibling, Bar Sawa. Inoue would move to a smaller space to offer a more premium experience, and chef Kato Shingo would take over the Kaneyoshi room, serving a tasting menu combining Japanese, French and Thai cuisines. (It's called Maison Kanatha and it opened in October.) A storage closet was also being renovated and…

Inoue turned abruptly to Kim. “You know what, what are you doing?” Inoue asked.

“Me?” Kim remembers saying. “How did I get into this conversation?”

Kim brushed it off, but the next day Inoue called him and said, “I wasn't kidding.”

Ten months later, behind a gnarled wooden door with a blinking “Employees Only” sign, Ki Restaurant had a home.

You can't casually stroll through the underground restaurants of the Kajima building. Coming to them for the first time is a rite of passage. Enter through the second floor of the attached parking lot. A beleaguered security guard, who gives the same set of instructions dozens of times a night, will direct you to the only elevator in a group of three that descends to level B. The doors open to an antechamber with chairs and benches. Check in with a staff member, who, after a short wait, ushers diners into Ki on a first-come, first-served basis.

Ki is a 10-person tasting menu restaurant serving modern Korean cuisine, tucked away in a building in Little Tokyo.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Stone and earth tones evoke calm in the beautiful spare room. Ceramic ladybugs may appear on the end of whimsical cutlery. Duck liver cubes may arrive in a glass container shaped like a chicken. Kim's musical taste dates back to Lite FM R&B of the 1980s. Some may find it annoying to listen to James Ingram's “One Hundred Ways” during an otherwise silent dinner. I'm the guy at the end of the counter trying to keep quiet while singing.

Smoked trout roe garnish for a plate of perilla leaf, smoked tomato and lemon fern sorbet at Ki Restaurant.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Kim, chef de cuisine Ryan Brown and their team race back and forth between a small back kitchen, reappearing to drop into tightly choreographed assembly lines to compose dishes. The first snack is a laborious one-bite wonder: a reinvention of bugak, a deep-fried snack often made with glutinous rice and dried vegetables. This equipment sandwiches sheets of seaweed and rice paste in five microthin layers; The next steps involve dehydrating, resting, frying, and shaping the final result into small cylinders filled with small cubes of tuna, or perhaps cod slurry in the winter. Seasonings include honey mustard and thyme leaves. Everything crunches, melts, sparkles and prepares your taste buds for more.

It is also a small synthesis of Kim's philosophy. Almost everything he creates can be traced back to South Korea, where he was born, even if, at first glance, the root inspiration may not be recognizable in the final form of the dish. In his approach I see a kinship with Jon Yao's wonderful transformations of Taiwanese cuisine at Kato.

The signature octopus arrives shortly after, in the form of a few soft, crispy rounds served with a masterfully intense fluorescent orange sauce derived from the creature's long-simmered entrails, scented with tarragon and sprinkled with powdered parsley. Its strange mysteries flicker in my brain until the perilla sorbet, a couple of courses later, washes them away.

Octopus at Ki Restaurant.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Lobster, doenjang and raspberry at Restaurant Ki.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Lacquered meats, fish covered in pools of complex chili and herb sauces, and geometrically cut fruits arranged around shaved ice will change with the seasons. A consistent dish, along with the noodles, has been the grilled lobster on doenjang beurre blanc, whose blend of richness and fermented depth lends unexpected nuances to the sweet, smoky crustacean. For fun, a touch of acid comes from a pinkish-red layer of powdered raspberries, shaken onto the plate in front of you with a rolled-up piece of cheesecloth. The showbiz part is usually done by a chef other than Kim, who has moved on to the next task of adjusting the salt in a coulis or quartering quail. He's serious and soft-spoken, but he seems much happier than I remember him being at Kinn.

Back then, in a review, I called his first restaurant “the future of fine dining in Los Angeles.” At Ki, I listen to Luther Vandross sing “Here and Now” as I scrape the last sticky bits of crab from my bowl of noodles. Luther always knew what was happening. The future has arrived.