Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Food & Drink

NYC’s Genesis House combines Korean food and luxury cars (and it totally works)

Enjoy cuisine from the Michelin-starred team of Seoul's Onjium above a Genesis car showroom

Hunter Lu
By
Genesis House Interior
The Genesis House restaurant. Genesis House

In the busy and trendy neighborhood of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, luxury is no stranger. Some of the city’s most Instagrammable and viral social media locations are here, including The High Line, Pier 57, Little Island, and Chelsea Market. To stand out in this neighborhood requires an edge, something different than the rest.

Genesis House NYC is attempting to accomplish that rarified air. It’s a multi-faceted concept that takes a few sentences to explain. It’s a Korean fine-dining restaurant serving a carefully curated, seasonal tasting menu. It’s a car showroom for Genesis, Hyundai’s luxury car vehicle division, and the namesake for the location. There’s also a tea pavilion, complete with a small library and a separate area called The Cellar Stage, where they host modern art and dance events. But at the center of all of this is an intricate, focused dedication to Korean culture, both past and contemporary.

Genesis car showroom
The car showroom at Genesis House. Genesis House

The Genesis House concept

First opened in November 2021, Genesis House was deliberately designed to be an “oasis amid the hustle and bustle of the city,” according to Rachel Espersen, the Executive Director, Head of Brand Experience for Genesis House & Studios.

Recommended Videos

“Genesis House offers all who walk through its doors the opportunity to connect with each other and their surroundings through community, culinary experience, and design,” explains Espersen.

Related

Upon entering the first floor, guests will immediately find themselves in the middle of a car showroom. Greeted by the curators, they are encouraged to explore the selection of the newest Genesis vehicles in the space, including the all-electric Genesis GV60 and the Genesis GV80 Coupe, an SUV. From there, guests can venture to the second floor to enjoy the large outdoor terrace and, of course, the restaurant, complete with the tea pavilion. Throughout all these concepts, the central theme highlights the Genesis brand as progressive and audacious but also uniquely Korean.

“As the showpiece of Genesis House, we want visitors to be immersed in Korean culture,” said Espersen, “which is woven throughout each space through culinary expression, architecture, art, and literature.”

Genesis house Korean food
A selection of dishes at Genesis House. Genesis House

Modern Korean cuisine with a royal twist

Despite the eye-popping car showroom, the highlight for many guests will be the food. And it’s no wonder — the restaurant at Genesis House is crafted and helmed by the culinary team behind Onjium, a Seoul restaurant awarded one star by the Michelin Guide. The best way to describe the food at Genesis House is that it pays both homage to history and modernity. The food here is inspired by Korean Royal cuisine, and chefs at Genesis take pains to use traditional techniques and ingredients sourced from old recipes and noble households dating back centuries. The main historical era of focus is the Joseon Dynasty, a 500-year span of history that stretched from 1392 to 1897.

If you’re expecting the brightly red, heavily sweet, and spicy pungency of your favorite Korean BBQ restaurant, the food here will be the opposite. Korean cuisine has evolved over the centuries, and the royal cuisine of the Joseon Dynasty was much lighter in spice, focused on more delicate flavors, with seasonality playing a major factor.

“Our New York team helmed by Chef Losa Yi,” said Espersen. “And works hand in hand with Onjium to create menus that reflect seasonality while staying true to Korean traditions and the centuries-old recipes from which each dish was inspired by. We incorporate as many ingredients from Korea as possible, often through special craftsmen that Onjium has built relationships with, and work collaboratively to select dishes that we believe our guests will enjoy and also represent the original restaurant in Seoul.”

Dishes can include Sujeunggye, a stuffed half chicken with beef, mung bean sauce, and cucumber, a recipe sourced from the diaries of Eumsik Dimibang, a 17th-century royal cook. In Korea, chicken is considered a summer meat, while beef, a red meat, is a cold-weather food believed to provide warmth. This clever combination plays off these historical and cultural intricacies, giving diners the best of both worlds.

But not all dishes are meat-centric. One such dish is the vegetarian dish, Nammansi Dubu Naengchae, consisting of heirloom tomatoes, asparagus, tofu cheese, Asian pear, lemon juice, and passionfruit syrup. Served cold, it’s a refreshing start to the tasting menu that’s complex and brightly highlights the natural flavor of the seasonal vegetables. It’s also served with a shot of clear tomato water that looks plain but is, in reality, a complicated process.

“Clear tomato water is made by extracting the pure juices from the tomato,” explains Espersen. “This is done by blending tomatoes and hanging them over a fine mesh cloth for one day. This yields a very clear juice that is full of tomato flavor. The remaining pulp is then squeezed, which produces a stronger and redder tomato juice. These two liquids are blended (at a ratio of 2:1) and cooked with arrowroot powder which thickens the liquid. The texture is akin to a variety of thin Korean porridge known as eungi.”

The best way to enjoy the juice is to sip it while enjoying bites of perfectly cooked vegetables. It’s an elegant start to the Genesis House tasting menu and perfectly embodies its philosophy and goal — highlighting an immersive and unique experience of Korean culture.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Hunter Lu
Hunter Lu
Contributor
Hunter Lu is a New York-based food and features writer, editor, and NYU graduate. His fiction has appeared in The Line…
Cooking tips: Fire up the blowtorch to perfect these 10 delicious foods
While we may have evolved considerably past cavepeople, cooking with fire is still pretty fun
Blowtorch on creme brulee

Human beings survived in part because we learned to cook. We took fire and we put other animals over that fire, making them edible and therefore ensuring that as far as planet Earth goes, humans are at the top of the food chain. Over time, the use of direct-fire cooking has changed and evolved, just as we have. While we tend to use open flames mainly when camping and grilling in the backyard, we can also use an open flame pretty much wherever we want, thanks to the handheld blowtorch.

Small but mighty, a blowtorch is a great appliance to have on hand for kitchen torch recipes. Not only can you use it to help you smoke cocktails, but you can apply direct fire to a whole host of foods for blowtorch recipes and flambé the hell out of them. (OK, not all of them are flambéed, because they would entail dousing the food with booze à la Bananas Foster, but roll with it.)

Read more
How to break a fast – the best foods to eat
What to eat (and drink) when you're ready to chow down after a fast
Bowls of bone broth on a tray

Fasting has been a common practice for thousands of years in numerous cultures. In the last decade, the knowledge behind how to break a fast and intermittent fasting has become more known and used. Some people practice time-restricted eating. This involves limiting how many hours per day you can eat.
For example, 18/6 intermittent fasting would entail fasting for 18 hours per day, typically overnight, then doing all of your eating during a six-hour window in the daylight hours. In this scenario, you might have your first meal of the day at noon, finish your last meal at 6 p.m., and then fast overnight until the following day at noon. 
Other people practice alternate-day fasting, which essentially involves a 24-hour water fast followed by a full day of regular eating in a cyclical pattern. Others just do an occasional 24-hour fast when they feel comfortable doing so. As the name implies, this means you won't eat for a full 24-hour window. Keeping hydrated with water intake is always allowed in any safe fasting program.
When you're practicing intermittent fasting or engaging in occasional fasting, the focus is typically on getting through the fasting window until it's time to eat again rather than what you will actually eat when the fast has lifted.
What are the best foods to break a fast? Keep reading to find out.

Bone broth
Bone broth isn't particularly filling, so it might not be the most satisfying food to break a fast, but it’s often a great place to start. It's extremely easy to digest and high in some key nutrients your body needs after fasting.
For example, it's rich in electrolytes like potassium, sodium, magnesium, and calcium. Electrolytes are important minerals for all kinds of vital physiological processes, such as maintaining fluid balance, conducting nerve impulses, and initiating the contraction and relaxation of muscles. They also improve hydration and are required for the digestion and absorption of nutrients like carbohydrates.
After fasting, the main macronutrient the body needs is protein. Although there are storable forms of carbohydrates and fat in the body in muscle and liver glycogen and adipose (fat) tissue, the only protein storage is skeletal muscle. Prolonged fasting can break down muscle tissue because the body constantly needs protein for many basic functions and biochemical processes. When you’re fasting and not taking in any protein, your body has to break down muscle tissue to access the protein it needs to sustain normal life functions.
Many protein-rich foods, particularly animal flesh, are fairly hard to digest because the proteins have complex, three-dimensional structures that require much work to digest and absorb the individual amino acids. Bone broth is great for breaking a fast because the proteins are already partially broken down, reducing the work the body has to do on its own. The protein here is absorbed easily, particularly compared to the protein found in animal flesh; the long cooking process of bone broth partially degrades the protein into a more digestible form.
Additionally, much of the protein in bone broth is collagen. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and forms a structural component in everything from teeth and skin to muscles, cartilage, and tendons. The body can synthesize collagen by combining the amino acids proline and glycine in a synthesis process that requires vitamin C, zinc, and copper. However, eating foods rich in collagen negates the need for this process, allowing the protein to be readily available for use.
Try to eat natural, organic bone broth; homemade is best. Otherwise, look for pre-packaged organic bone broth without added cream, fat, or excessive salt. You can also simmer it with vegetables such as carrots, broccoli, and dark, leafy green vegetables to add more vitamins and minerals.

Read more
How to lose belly fat: Eating these 10 foods more often will help a lot
Diet won't do it all, but we bet you need to make a few tweaks
Jicama

Those of us who care about our health and physical appearance can often find ourselves mulling over some tough health-related questions -- how we can be healthier, how to be more active, and how to lose belly fat. In a world of almost too much information on these subjects, it's easy to become confused and overwhelmed. But, at the end of the day, we know the general answer comes down to diet and exercise. And yes, they're equally important.

Sure, we can spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on workout equipment and gym memberships. We can exercise until we're blue in the face, lifting all the weights and doing all the situps. But if we're not eating the right foods, that stubborn belly fat just isn't going anywhere, no matter how fancy the gym is. If you want to know how to lose belly fat fast, you're going to have to start at the grocery store, not the ab machine.

Read more