Finding your way into Joomak feels a little like you’ve double-crossed your capo and are about to be whacked. The restaurant is all the way over on the West Side Highway, inside the Maison Hudson hotel, and getting there involves being escorted by a staff member down an elevator and through a series of hallways. 

The small dining room, with around two dozen seats, is almost anticlimactic: an elegant but generic space that looks the same as it did in its previous incarnation as a French restaurant. But Joomak’s eight playful courses are completely distinctive. They wouldn’t appear on any other tasting menu. 

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

You'll find langoustine in gochujang bouillabaisse and a palate-cleansing mandarin granita spiked with chili oil, but the food is not, as your server explains, "strictly Korean." Instead, each dish crosses unexpected wires, to frequently electrifying results. Otoro appears camouflaged as a cheeseburger, and a graceful quenelle of ice cream turns out to be a Harry Potter-inspired butterbeer. 

Anything involving dough in sweet or savory form is excellent—the chef (also behind Joomak Banjum, Ddobar, and Bar Whimsy) used to do pastry at The Modern. Here, he reprises that restaurant’s pretzel croissant in miniature form, a three-dimensional butter sculpture barely held together by a load-bearing framework of flour and salt.

So many tastings prioritize luxury, but Joomak stands out for putting an equal emphasis on novelty.  That makes it a very good choice for a spendy special occasion, where you can rest assured you won’t be bored.

Food Rundown

Tasting Menu

Joomak offers an eight-course tasting menu for $280. An optional wagyu supplement is another $80. Dishes may change, but here are a few highlights from our last meal:

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

Amuse Bouche

A trio of miniature tributes to iconic NYC sandwiches include a meringue-textured everything bagel with king salmon and a banh mi reimagined with wagyu and uni. Both are good, but the doll-sized otoro “smashburger” is a particularly brain-tickling illusion—one of the best bites of the entire meal. The combination of nori choux bun, fatty tuna, and egg yolk gelée captures the smoky richness of a chargrilled burger (specifically, a Burger King Double Stacker). This is the kind of behavior that used to get you accused of witchcraft.

photo credit: Molly Fitzpatrick

Caviar And Dill Custard

Spring in a bowl. Chunks of white asparagus, sweet mussels, and pea shoots are suspended in a dill custard that gets greener as you stir. Tasting it is like walking through a meadow close enough to the seaside you can smell the salt spray. The caviar is, somehow, the least interesting component. (Not that we don’t appreciate it.)

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

Scallop

A very nutty brown butter sabayon is applied tableside on top of a crisply seared scallop, which itself rests on pretty little blobs of smoked dashi and black sesame panna cotta, some of which wear little discs of black truffle as hats. It’s umami on umami on umami, but all those layers of savoriness feel anything but redundant.

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

Norwegian King Crab

Crack open a delicate gochujang tuile envelope and sprinkle the furikake inside over a bowl of kani miso koshikari rice. The grains have a lovely chew, and they’re bursting with the kind of powerfully crabby flavor you can only achieve by putting roe, brains, and all the other hidden treasures of the carapace to good use.

photo credit: Andrew Sokolow

Banana Bread Pudding

This dessert initially appears to be a little foamy glass of Guinness. It's the evening’s second interactive tuile moment: Shatter the chocolate shell with your spoon and creme anglaise flows out, combining with milk chocolate sorbet in a melty, swirling, baking-spiced tide pool around a cylinder of moist banana bread. No two wonderful bites are the same, especially once you involve the salty, toffee-ish butterbeer ice cream on the side.