‘Baked Ziti-Style’ Korean Rice Cakes and Banchan at a New Wine Bar

As for that salad — the recipe has evolved. It features a “double dressing” of sesame-silken tofu puree (at Achilles it was whipped with pine nuts, sesame seeds, and sesame oil, but she’s added tahini and done away with nuts at Sunn’s for a friend with allergies). The second dressing was what she and her cooks at Achilles called “mother”; an everlasting soup-style vinaigrette that kept building as they added odds and ends like roasted onion juice.

Her banchan pop-ups — which started more formally during the pandemic — caught the attention of Grant Reynolds, the owner of wine bar Parcelle, known for working with chefs like Kate Telfeyan in the West Village and Ron Yan of Chinese restaurant Tolo. The 24-seat Sunn’s, with a counter and a few tables, has been fermenting for the past couple of months, but it’s been a lifetime in the making. She’s partnered up with Reynolds (his Parcelle team handles the wine list; there’s also beer, soju, and makgeolli). She was hesitant to open another restaurant but the constraints of the small storefront — Reynolds’ former Pig Bar — were appealing: a space where she could interact with her guests directly and oversee a tiny team. There’d be no hood, so most of the dishes would need to be room temperature, or cold. The Moffat oven will “be the workhorse” alongside the induction burners, she says. Banchan will, of course, be a focus of the menu.

“Sunny’s food is both homey and creative, a balance for me that’s essential for any great neighborhood restaurant,” says Reynolds. Right on time as New York wine bars level up — and look beyond — routine charcuterie boards. She’s well suited to take it on: A chef who has worked in New York’s fanciest restaurants as well as neighborhood standbys — and remains grounded.

Lee says she knew wanted to be a chef when she was a child. She got her start in Andover, Massachusetts working at an Italian restaurant (the kind of place serving “a flourless chocolate torte with raspberry coulis”) where the chef encouraged her to attend culinary school. She went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and interned at her first fine dining restaurant, a Boston spot called Radius. Eventually, she moved to New York to work at Blue Hill, not without a stint in Paris working under David Toutain, and later, back in Manhattan at Eleven Madison Park.

“It was really fun to learn about technique. I just didn’t really crave anything I was eating and didn’t feel like I connected with it,” she says. She moved to spots like ZZ’s Clam Bar and Estela.

Over the years, she realized it was time to try out the small, neighborhood Brooklyn restaurant where she could learn about the business side: There was Dover and Battersby, and later Insa, as she prioritized learning how to cook Korean food. Long before she started using the Banchan by Sunny moniker in 2022 at Peoples Wine Bar, she had already started doing pop-ups: “Back then I think we just called them dinners,” she says. “I would work all day and then come home and cook Korean food,” a mix of childhood memories, calling aunts, and early Maangchi YouTube videos. A friend encouraged her to look inwards at where she was spending her after-hours energy — maybe that was the food she should be cooking professionally.

During the pandemic, Lee worked at Peoples alongside Chef Quang “Q” Nguyen (who has since opened his own wine bar restaurant Demo). She says his style of transforming everyday ingredients pushed her to stay loose and create dishes like the Sunn’s spicy tuna mayak kimbap. In addition to rice, for a twist, she uses Rice Krispies with yellow beet pickles.

“I thought why not switch it up? I’m afraid of falling into the fusion situation but it’s truly an awesome texture. Mixing it, it sounds like you’re making Rice Krispies treats,” she says.

Handmaking tteokbokki was “impractical”, so, on this round, she’s sourcing the Korean rice cakes from Hansol grocer in Queens. They’ll be at Sunn’s in a tomato-gochujang brown butter sauce topped with stracciatella and mozzarella cheese, served in a glass Pyrex dish: “Sunday baked ziti-style.” Hotteok will also be on the menu. Her slabs of sesame-crusted mochi, finished with toasted soybean powder, are exemplary of a not-too-sweet dessert and have been adapted for Sunn’s as well.

It’s taken her a while to arrive here — including a detour with her first restaurant, Ajjuma, circa 2017 Williamsburg, which didn’t end up working out — but she says she is done working for other people. With Sunn’s, it’s personal, down to the scallops on the menu that she sources from her father, a hobbyist diver, who freeze-packs the shellfish and she brings it home from Massachusetts. It’ll be a dish that is served in a limited supply on the menu (upon opening, the scallops feature white cloud ear mushrooms with yuzu chogochujang-marinated burdock root.)

In addition to family photos, her husband, the artist Michael Siporin Levine, who designed all her pop-up fliers, created a monoprint of the Korean cooking vessel gamasot (which was gifted to the married couple for their wedding) that presides over the dining room.

“I guess maybe that’s why I’m opening this place, is to figure out what do we call [this style of food]. All I know is I really, really want to cook for people.” And, she says, “I don’t want to do it out of my apartment anymore.”