Inside Meta: how chef-owner Sun Kim distils heritage, technique and memory to their essence

Born in Busan, Kim grew up in Seoul, where his mother ran a gamja-tang restaurant. The pork bone and potato stew belongs to the rhythms of everyday Korean life, and food was simply the world around him. His closest friends also came from restaurant families: one ran a Korean-Chinese restaurant, another ran a seafood hotpot place. As children, they moved easily between these tables, eating lunch at one and dinner at another. For Kim, a life in food began to feel almost inevitable. “It was very natural,” he says. “I wanted to be a chef. I wanted to cook.”

His first dish was egg fried rice with ketchup, cooked for himself and his older brother when their parents were at work. His brother still requests it when he visits Singapore from South Korea. Kim still cooks it, though the verdict is always the same: “It’s not as good as it was when we were much younger.”

The pull towards fine dining came later, in a bookshop. As a young chef in South Korea, Kim spent his days off reading cookbooks he could barely afford. There, he discovered Japanese chef Tetsuya Wakuda. “I saw his cookbook and everything looked like art,” Kim says. “I thought, wow, this is food.” That story became a model of possibility. Kim moved to Sydney, studied English, enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu and kept applying to the iconic Tetsuya’s until he was hired. He worked there from 2011 to 2013, before moving to Singapore in 2014 to continue training under Wakuda at Waku Ghin.

“Chef Tetsuya is my idol and he always will be,” Kim says. “I learnt most of my cooking techniques from him.” What stayed with Kim was the idea that a cuisine could absorb multiple influences and still belong wholly to its maker. “I always wanted to have that kind of direction,” he shares. “I do Korean food, but quietly, behind it, I want to use different techniques.”

Read more: How Tetsuya Wakuda shaped modern fine dining and continues to inspire the next generation of chefs

That freedom took time. In Meta’s early years, Kim was still searching for difference through abundance. “I was quite a young chef and wanted to be different,” the 42-year-old says. “I tried many different cooking techniques and put a lot of things on the plate, like most chefs back then.” He remembers adding flourishes that dishes did not need. When asked what he might now remove, he says: "Everything. Extra pickles, extra this and that. The dish didn’t need them.”

The turning point came through produce and confidence shaped over time. With each move—from Meta’s original Keong Saik site to another address a few doors away, then to its current home on Mohamed Sultan Road—the cooking became clearer. “Over the years, I’ve experienced many different ingredients,” Kim says. “Now, I’ve realised that simple is actually best for my cuisine.”

Simplicity, at Meta, is a form of attention. “We keep the originality of Korean flavour. It is very balanced, yet very complex,” Kim shares. Jang—the broad family of Korean fermented sauces and pastes—forms the foundation. Within it are gochujang, fermented chilli paste, and doenjang, fermented soya bean paste. Perilla oil, omija—the five-flavour Korean berry—and kimchi are woven through the menu.

Kim avoids calling Meta simply a Korean restaurant because the label feels too narrow. “Once you say this is a Korean restaurant, I'm only in that box,” he says. “But if I say it’s modern or contemporary, I have a bigger box to play in. I want people to understand that there are Korean elements for them to enjoy.”

The spring menu shows this approach with precision. There is bibim guksu, cold mixed noodles sharpened with fermented chilli and perilla oil; gyeran jjim, a steamed egg custard, lifted with omija, basil and crème fraîche; Jeju abalone with kamtae, lily bulb and juk; and barbecue Wagyu with spring pea rice, jangajji—or Korean pickled vegetables—and celtuce. Korean flavour appears as heat, acidity, fermentation and memory, giving each dish its internal architecture.

Seasonality is where that memory often begins. Kim’s spring pea rice came from a childhood dislike. “When my mother cooked green pea rice, I wouldn’t eat it,” he recalls. Years later, he tasted French green peas in season, sweet enough to eat raw, and the memory returned differently. At Meta, he cooks them with rice in a cast-iron pot for the meat course. “It’s from my memory of my younger days,” he says. “Now, I serve it to customers and they like it.”

Kim looks to Korea, Japan, France and elsewhere for ingredients, but is increasingly focused on Korean produce that remains less widely known abroad. He mentions dureup, a Korean spring mountain vegetable with bitterness, sweetness and the taste of the season. “You can actually taste spring,” he says.

Singapore has given him the space to cook this way. Kim has lived here for more than a decade, is married to a Singaporean and now calls the city—where they are raising their young son—home. In that time, he has watched the dining scene broaden beyond its once-dominant European fine-dining vocabulary. “Within the past decade, this city has grown very fast,” he says. “It’s so dynamic now, with so many different types of restaurants.”

He cites Han Li Guang’s Labyrinth, Malcolm Lee’s Candlenut, Mano Thevar’s Thevar and Kevin Wong’s Seroja—Wong also worked alongside him at Meta—as restaurants that reflect a city increasingly confident in its own Asian culinary languages. That breadth matters. Singapore’s openness, multiculturalism and well-travelled diners have allowed Meta to be Korean without overexplaining Korean-ness. “Everybody knows Singapore is a melting pot,” he says. “People [are open to trying] different cuisines. We have a global mindset and people like to dine out. Our multiculturalism has a part to play as well.” For a chef cooking from memory, such openness becomes permission.

Recognition, from Michelin Guide (two stars) and Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants (number 77 in 2026) to Tatler Best, arrives at this stage as an acknowledgement of maturity rather than the point of the story. Kim is grateful, but he measures success differently. “Awards mean a lot to us as [they are recognitions of] the hard work of all chefs, which is good,” he says. “But I don't really focus on [them]. I don’t want to be the best chef or [for Meta to be] the best restaurant in the world. I want Meta to be a place with return customers—people who come back and enjoy the food.”

After years of refining Korean cuisine into a fine-dining language, Kim is returning to forms of food that endure because they are shared. He is planning a more casual Korean comfort food restaurant, though details remain private. Korean barbecue is one emotional anchor: lettuce and perilla leaves folded around grilled meat in ssam, the Korean way of eating with leaf wraps, with spring onion salad cutting through the richness. “Korean barbecue is a family meal,” he says. “Everybody sits down. Usually, the father [figure] cooks for everyone.” It is something that he, too, does for his own family on Sundays.

Kim’s definition of comfort food has also expanded with his life in Singapore. He speaks warmly of the Singaporean Indian food cooked by his mother-in-law: chicken curry, prawn sambal and other dishes he looks forward to each week. “For me, comfort food means home-cooked food,” he says. “Singapore is my home now. My mother-in-law cooks Indian food for us, and that is my comfort food at the moment. I look forward to it every week.”

At Meta, metamorphosis has become a kind of clarity. The abalone dish remains because it holds the thought at the heart of Kim's cuisine: that evolution, at its most meaningful, returns him to what endures.

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