Jeong Kwan

Jeong Kwan is a Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhist nun and a chef in the tradition of Korean Buddhist temple cuisine (사찰음식, sachal eumsik). She lives and cooks at Chunjinam, a small hermitage attached to Baekyangsa Temple in the Naejangsan mountains of South Korea's Jeollanam-do province. She is not a restaurateur in any conventional sense — she does not own a restaurant, does not accept payment for her cooking, and cooks primarily for fellow nuns, monks and visitors to the hermitage — but since the mid-2010s she has become one of the most internationally influential figures in vegan and plant-based fine dining.

She entered Buddhist orders as a teenager after the death of her mother and learned temple cooking under the celebrated Korean temple-cuisine teacher Songbeop Sunim. Korean Buddhist temple cuisine is strictly vegan and avoids the five 'pungent vegetables' (onion, garlic, leek, chive, scallion) on the doctrinal grounds that they overstimulate the body and obstruct meditation; it relies instead on extensive fermentation — soy sauce aged in onggi pots for decades, doenjang (soybean paste), gochujang made from temple-grown chiles, fermented vegetables, mountain greens, mushrooms and the seasonal produce of the temple grounds.

She came to international attention in 2015 when Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin visited Baekyangsa and subsequently invited her to cook a dinner at Le Bernardin in New York. She was featured in Season 3 of Netflix's Chef's Table (2017) in an episode now widely cited as one of the most influential pieces of food television of the decade. Since then she has cooked at Eleven Madison Park, at Le Bernardin, at the Vatican, and at dozens of other international stages — always returning to the hermitage.

Her cooking is widely cited as a foundational reference for the contemporary plant-based fine-dining movement; Daniel Humm has spoken publicly about her direct influence on his decision to convert Eleven Madison Park to a fully plant-based tasting menu in 2021.