Joshua Smookler

Joshua Smookler’s career was built in kitchens that prize pace, control, and repetition. At Bouley and then Per Se in New York City, he worked inside two rooms known for exacting standards, and those years set the technical floor for the work that followed. The move to Mu Ramen as chef and co-owner shifted the register from pure execution toward authorship, while still carrying fine-dining discipline forward. In Sonoma, California, he later served as Executive Chef at Animo in 2022, carrying that same structure into a different market without leaving behind the New York training that shaped it.

Since 2023, he has been chef and co-owner of Golden Bear Station, extending a career that moves between coasts without breaking continuity. The thread across those roles is not reinvention for its own sake, but a steady refinement of a personal cooking language.

At Golden Bear Station in Kenwood, Smookler’s work is still organized around the meeting point of place and background. As Executive Chef at Animo, he remains tied to New York City, where much of his professional base was formed. Those two posts sit on opposite coasts, but they are part of the same practice: applying a consistent point of view across different dining rooms and markets. The cooking is shaped by the facts of his biography rather than by abstraction.

Born in Korea and adopted by a Jewish family in New York, Smookler draws from Korean, Basque, and Jewish traditions as one working vocabulary. The result is fusion in the practical sense: not a concept on paper, but a way of joining inherited forms into dishes that read as specific to him.

The signature dishes point to range rather than a single lane. Whole dry-aged turbot speaks to control and restraint at the stove. Kimchi fried rice keeps the work close to speed, texture, and direct flavor. Hot honey pizza shows the same hand in a more contemporary format, where familiar structure is pushed by a sharper sweet-heat profile.

The clearest markers of the career are the kitchens themselves: Mu Ramen in Long Island City, Golden Bear Station in Kenwood since 2023, and Animo in New York City. Read together, they map a chef working between New York and California with enough consistency that the locations become part of the technique.