John Hong

The Path

John Hong’s training starts with The Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago, then moves into the tighter discipline of The Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa Valley, California. There, as chef de partie, garde manger until 2016, the work was about repetition, precision, and the pace required in a serious kitchen. In 2016, he advanced to Head Chef at The Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa Valley, California, carrying that same structure into a leadership role. By 2022, as chef and partner of Yangban, the progression had settled into a clear line: learn the craft, lead the craft, then apply it in a new setting.

The Work Today

Since 2022, Hong has been chef and partner at Yangban in Los Angeles, California, where the restaurant’s specialty is Modern Korean-American cuisine. The food there sits between Korean flavors and regional California ingredients, with the balance held deliberately rather than loosely. At Yangban, the kitchen reads as controlled and specific, and the dishes follow that logic without extra noise. The named dishes from 2024 show how that control appears on the plate. Matzoh Ball Mandu, Shmaltz-Poached Makataki Mushroom, Chicken Broth joined mandu, mushroom, and Chicken Broth in one dish. Sujebi, White Kimchi-Yogurt Whey Beurre Blanc, Soy-Cured Ocean Trout, Tout Roe, Dill used sujebi and ocean trout as its frame. The names are doing real work here: they lay out the structure, make the combinations legible, and show the kitchen’s hybrid language plainly. Yangban does not read as a departure from the earlier years at Meadowood so much as a continuation of the same discipline in a different register. The techniques may sit inside a new cultural vocabulary, but the method stays exact.

Signature

John's signature dishes include Matzoh Ball Mandu, Sujebi, and Banchan Set.

In Their Words “My role is to make sure that the kitchen’s running properly. That cooks are being mentored and mostly just overseeing the whole operation; making sure the engines are running.”

Acclaim

A featured dish from his Meadowood menu, Dungeness Crab, House Almond Milk, Crab-Fish Sauce Gelee, Grated Almond, and Crab Oil, sits as an earlier marker in that line of work. Set beside the Yangban dishes from 2024, it shows the shift from the fine structure of a Napa kitchen into a Los Angeles restaurant centered on Korean-American cooking. The recognition in Hong’s career follows that same sequence of facts: the education in Chicago, , and the chef-partner title he took on in Los Angeles in 2022.