Q & A With Sang Yoon: Lukshon's Test Kitchen, Issues of Heat + Ghetto Fish Sauce

A. Scattergood

Sang Yoon outside Lukshon

Sang Yoon is not an easy man to pin down. He moves quickly. He doesn't like interviews, or at least so it's always seemed to us. But when he actually sits down and starts talking, he often doesn't stop. Which is very cool, since he's got a lot of interesting things to say. He's also hilarious. And he makes a damn fine bowl of dan dan noodles these days, especially since he's fiddled with the recipe as much as normal people mess with their car engines or their resumes. Not that, as Yoon is quick to tell you, Lukshon is a noodle restaurant, nor was it ever meant to be, issues of place names and grandmothers notwithstanding. (Read the whole interview.)

Turn the page for part one of our interview with the chef, whose long anticipated Lukshon opened in January. (Read Jonathan Gold's review here.) And whose second Father's Office outpost is conveniently located right next door. Oh, and let's not forget Yoon's test kitchen, a chef's playroom -- blast freezer, cans of liquid nitrogen, vacuum steamer -- that is across the Helms Bakery complex parking lot. More fun with speed walking.

Squid Ink: So congratulations on the opening of your latest restaurant. It took awhile.

Sang Yoon: It did.

SI: It seems like yours took longer than other people's sometimes do. Or is that just a misperception.

SY: There were a lot of moving parts. [Pots crash in the kitchen.] And clanging sounds in the back. I think my projects take longer for a certain set of reasons, whereas other people's might take longer for other reasons.

SI: Like building codes?

SY: Well, I don't know. I don't think I've broken any time records for how long records have taken. I mean, either way, neither the fastest or the slowest. There is a lot of preparation and detail that goes into stuff I want to do, so as far as the construction of the restaurant, there were a zillion custom details that were sort of fawned over and thought of over and over again. There's nothing off the shelf in there; everything had to be built. That's why it took so long. It wasn't regulatory, necessarily. We had our normal share, but not our unfair share. It took about a year.

SI: That's not that bad.

SY: Yeah. You can build a restaurant in half that time, or less, if you really wanted to. You can, it's just you get a different product. It's like anything.

SI: And you make pretty much everything.

SY: Oh, yeah. When people think of Asian food it seems like there's a lot of emphasis on sauces and condiments. The sambals and srirachas and hot sauce, stuff like that. And I wanted to make as many of those things as possible. So the first order of business was to create a pantry, a working pantry, before we came up with any of the dishes. We made our own XO, our own hoisin, our own sriracha, our own collection of sambals, the Malaysian sauces and noodle bases, curry bases, dry spice blends, just as a fundamental basis. No finished dishes, just like let's create the pantry. We spent a lot of time procuring interesting spices. We had a lot of herbs planted for us because we couldn't buy them. So we had to find seeds.

SI: And wait for them to grow.

SY: Yeah, that was a lot of that first year and a half: literally planting seeds. Literally. Like, I want to use this herb, where do you buy it? You can't. So okay, who do I know in Singapore. Send me a box of seeds, put them in the ground, see what happens. Yeah, the first several months of recipe testing was all -- we didn't have a dish -- it was just, let's come up with 15 different curry powders.

SI: It sounds like you were building your own meth lab.

SY: Sort of, yeah. The test kitchen kind of looks like that. Just building the foundation, like creating your own store to shop out of. We tried everything. We tried making our own fish sauce; that didn't really work. Stunk to high heaven.

SI: Doesn't it take months to make a good fish sauce?

SY: Yeah. We tried a quick ghetto version. It takes some time and you have to really know what you're doing. It's not something that you can just make at home. Not to mention, I don't think that most people can tolerate the smell.

SI: Tell us more about your test kitchen.

SY: It's a luxury to have. I always say it's like a musician having his own recording studio. It's like a place to play; it's a kitchen that has a ton of toys. It's actually next to a patio, so we can do some private events. It's across the parking lot. The nice thing is that there's no service, there's no customers, it's not attached to a business.