Alfonso’s Italian Restaurant

I follow his gaze, into the past. The memory isn’t mine, but it becomes tangible to me as he describes being in his second year of high school, watching a program that aired every evening at 6 pm where home-taught cooks showed their audience how to make tasty dishes. Once a week, a trained chef would come on the show, and on this day, it was the tall, white chef’s hat that strikes him. A defining moment, we call it. From this point on, Gongjakso, the young boy from a small Korean village, knows that one day, he too would like to be a chef.

Today, Dae-Han and I talk with Gongjakso, who has adopted the Italian name Alfonso, in his restaurant where he is indeed the head chef, and most days the only chef. The restaurant can seat up to 16 people and is situated on a side street in a Korean neighborhood. Sunlight coming in through the large front windows bathes us in warmth.

In the four years that the restaurant has been open, Alfonso has not spent any money on marketing. People nose out his made-from-scratch Italian food through his Instagram, Naver, or word of mouth. I can attest to this. While Alfonso’s is not far from our home, we would likely not have found it had another restaurant owner not told us about it after learning of the neighborhood we live in.

I first took Mom, Dad, and Grandma to Alfonso’s when they came to visit in November. We were so enthused with the pasta and wine that I brought Dae-Han back for a weekday date night.

It is a shame that I was the only one present to hear Dae-Han’s 5-star reviews of these meals.

After fawning over the food once again, Dae-Han arranged for my 40th birthday to be at Alfonso’s. It was the perfect place to hold an intimate celebration with fabulous friends for a foodie’s 40th.

Cultivating connections has always been a vested interest of mine. Since moving abroad 10 years ago, I have become even more invested in creating community, to find my home away from home. Every dinner at Alfonso’s restaurant has allowed me to celebrate the connections and community that I found and fostered — from family to love to friendship. Thus, I wanted to know more about the man that had created a space that kept me coming back, for more food, for more special evenings, for more sense of home.

Alfonso began telling his story, speaking in Korean to Dae-Han who had come with to translate. This afforded me an opportunity to simply listen to Alfonso’s tone, and watch his eyes dance and his body become animated with gestures when I asked about how he first fell in love with food and the idea of being a chef.

It seemed that his young adolescent self is still living inside of him, returning to tell the tale of that day in front of the television. Over the course of an hour, sipping coffee out of cool glass tumblers, Alfonso told Dae-Han and I about how his parents at first were not thrilled with his choice to pursue food and the life of a chef. Growing up at a time that the patriachy had an even firmer hold on family and societal structures, Alfonso’s parents were displeased that he was interested in things that “a man shouldn’t do.”

What a man should do: what he loves.

His parents, being both loving and wise, were eventually won over as they saw a young man who was formerly a poor student begin to excel in his university courses. With time, Alfonso would go on to get a Master’s and PhD in Hotel Management with a focus in cooking and cuisine.

Culinary school in Korea is generally not centered on one kind of cuisine, and it was at this time in Alfonso’s life that he began working part-time at an Italian restaurant. The delicious recipes were easy to learn. Since there was not a school specifically for Italian cooking, Alfonso found his way to Italy. Over the course of a number of more years, going back and forth between Seoul and Italy, he would visit all 22 provinces, study pizza-making in Rome, and hone his skills at making all sorts of homemade noodles.

Books that Alfonso has written, including the first Korean dictionary of Italian cooking words.

Alfonso loved the the way that life in Italy was less fixed. In ways, this offered him more freedoms. But in the end, it was the pace, culture, and ethos of Seoul that brought him to return for good.

Four years ago, Alfonso opened his Italian restaurant that lies off the beaten path. He now teaches cooking classes three afternoons a week, is open for lunch each weekday, and offers dinner reservations six days a week.

I am pondering playing hooky in order to take part in Alfonso’s pasta-making class.

On Sundays, Alfonso is in his restaurant, enjoying the solitude, sun, and some tunes that play out of the speakers as he prepares for the week ahead.

For Alfonso, it is not expanding the restaurant or making more money that motivate him most. While he has one part-time staff member for weekday lunches, Alfonso prefers to prepare and make his dishes on his own. It would be hard to find a long term business partner, he explained to us. More than money, his personal ambitions are about the fine craft of his food. “A great source of happiness for me is that people come here. That simple act makes me so happy. And a completely empty plate, one where you can’t even tell what I served because the plate is so clean.”

It makes me smile to watch Alfonso share these last words with us today. Because I know then, that we’ve contributed to some of his happiness. And we’ll be back to use his bread to sop up all of the sauces again, because what he serves up equates to our happiness too.