Chef Shin Yong-woo brings Belong back to Seoul
After stages at two three-Michelin-starred kitchens in Denmark and England, the chef returns to Seoul's Cuisine K platform with a second edition of Belong.
Chef Shin Yong-woo is back in Seoul with a second edition of Belong, the Korean tasting-menu restaurant he first ran as a pop-up in 2023, now reopening under CJ CheilJedang's Cuisine K chef platform.
Belong opens October 7 in Gangnam-gu for a run of about six months. It is the tenth pop-up to come out of Cuisine K, the program CJ CheilJedang launched in 2023 to back emerging Korean chefs with kitchen space, menu consulting and marketing support in exchange for nothing: operators keep the revenue.
Shin Yong-woo's return after three-starred kitchens
Two three-starred European kitchens later, Seoul gets the Belong it was always going to get.
Shin Yong-woo ran Cuisine K's third pop-up, an earlier version of Belong, in 2023. Since then he has worked in two of Europe's most demanding dining rooms: Jordnær, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant outside Copenhagen, and L'Enclume, Simon Rogan's three-starred kitchen in Cumbria, England.
He returns with a tasting menu built around the idea of "finding one's place," a ten-course, tea-room-inflected format that threads Korean produce through European technique. The current line-up moves through jack mackerel, mushrooms, monkfish and duck as the season shifts.
Tea, ceramics and a six-month window
Tea pairings come from Sansuhwa, a tea house in Hannam-dong, matched course by course to temperature and aroma rather than poured as an afterthought. Tableware was developed with the Korean brand Odense and ceramicist Kim Eun-chae, and the dining room was styled by artist Kim Sung-mi.
Reservations run through Catch Table and Naver Booking, with service Tuesday to Saturday. A CJ CheilJedang representative said the company would "continue supporting the cultivation of Korean cuisine specialists to lead K-food's future."
Nine pop-ups have passed through Cuisine K since 2023, and several of its alumni now run restaurants of their own, one of them newly listed in Korea's 2026 Michelin Guide. The platform is also taking Korean seafood cooking classes to the UK, Vietnam and the US this autumn, part of a push to turn short residencies into lasting careers, much as Johanne Siy did opening Árō in Singapore.
Belong's second life is scheduled to close around April, leaving Shin Yong-woo roughly six months to decide what, if anything, comes next.
