Born in the bustling seaport of Pohang on South Korea’s east coast, Junsoo Bae grew up watching his mother ferment her own soy sauce, gochujang, and bean pastes. A self-described chubby kid, he equated delicious food with happiness—and by the age of 14, he knew he wanted to become a chef. His father, however, vehemently opposed the idea. 

“I wanted to prove myself—and to prove him wrong,” Bae says. His first kitchen job was washing dishes for $3 an hour at a Pizza Hut in his hometown. In an attempt to appease his father, he enrolled in a computer engineering program at a university in Busan, but dropped out after one semester. His heart wasn’t in it. Cooking was.

Following a difficult conversation with his father, Bae agreed to complete his mandatory two-year military service. If he still wanted to become a chef afterward, his father promised to support the decision. He spent those two years driving tanks along the frigid North Korean border, and once discharged, he applied to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.

At 24, with little formal experience beyond simple home cooking, Bae found himself surrounded by more advanced students already fluent in terms like mirepoix and mise en place.
Still, his determination paid off: after staging three times, he landed an externship at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. That opened the door to a one-month stage at Per Se, followed by three months at noma.

When Bae returned to New York, he was hired as a sous chef at Gramercy Tavern, where he met his wife, Hyunyoung Bae, then a line cook. After six years, the couple relocated to Northern California, where Bae joined the team at The Restaurant at Meadowood as a line cook.

In 2019, the Baes poured all of their wedding gift money into opening their own Korean-influenced fine dining restaurant, SSAL, in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood. Bae’s cuisine blends his classical Western training with Korean ingredients and personal memory. “I always wanted to chase fine dining to make myself proud and my family proud,” Bae says. 

SSAL earned its first Michelin star in 2022, which Bae has held since. His father, once skeptical, is now one of his biggest supporters. He cold-presses toasted Korean sesame oil and ships it in unmarked glass bottles from South Korea, where Bae uses it as a finishing oil at the table.