SSAL is an intimate, 24-seat restaurant in San Francisco offering a modern Californian tasting menu with Korean influences. The concept draws from chef Junsoo Bae’s childhood in South Korea and his Western culinary training in the United States and Europe. Bae works closely with local farmers and imports specialty ingredients—such as gamtae seaweed and his father’s homemade toasted sesame oil—from Korea.

The Heart of SSAL

When Junsoo and Hyunyoung Bae opened SSAL in 2019, they used all of their wedding gift money to fund their dream of owning a restaurant without outside investors. At the time, they served casual Korean comfort food. The name SSAL means “uncooked rice” in Korean—a tribute to Bae’s childhood memories of his grandmother’s rice shop, where he, his parents, and his uncles would help deliver 100-pound bags to customers.

During the pandemic, Bae pivoted to selling crunchy fried chicken to-go—a runaway success. For 18 months, with only his wife and a dishwasher to help, he served fried chicken nonstop and raised $250,000. That revenue funded a full renovation of SSAL, which reopened in 2021 as a tasting menu restaurant featuring minimalist interior design and works by Korean artists and artisans, including ceramics, brassware, vases, and paintings.

It was an ambitious move during a volatile time, but Bae reasoned that every fine dining restaurant had been set back to square one—and this might be his best chance to aim for Michelin stars. From the very first snacks—like hay-smoked Island Creek oysters dressed with chojang browned butter, and Korean sweet potato doughnuts topped with Tsar Nicoulai caviar—Bae displays an irreverent, innovative approach to flavor discovery.

One of Bae’s signature dishes is a Korean hand roll made with charcoal-grilled Maine eel marinated in soy and paired with koshihikari rice. Instead of crispy nori, it’s wrapped in soft gamtae seaweed, prized for its delicate, threadlike texture. SSAL received its first Michelin star in 2022, and in 2023, the restaurant’s growing wine collection earned a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence. With fewer Korean restaurants in San Francisco than in New York or Los Angeles, SSAL stands out in the city’s fine dining landscape.

Late-night fried chicken—served with caviar and Champagne—is one of SSAL’s most talked-about indulgences. “There’s nothing fine dining about it, but it’s exactly the menu we served during the pandemic, and now it’s part of our history,” Bae says. “The summer months aren’t typically so busy, so we wanted to bring the city’s late-night activity back and see some of our old guests again at a lower price point.”

The Chef

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.

View profile