Every inch of Somssi is charming: the lace curtains, the vintage baking tins repurposed as wall sconces, the plant-store potted greenery, the mismatched wooden chairs clustered around mismatched wooden tables. It’s the kind of charm that could tip, in less careful hands, into hospitality kitsch—all warmth, no substance. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Somssi’s appeal as mere superficial loveliness: there’s real muscle beneath all the gentility and sweetness, a brawny, almost radical confidence in both the service and the cuisine. Somssi’s managing partner, Ahris Kim, was for many years the director of operations for Na:Eun Hospitality, the group behind the ultra-high-end Korean-inspired tasting counter Atomix, which, for those who care about this sort of thing, was recently named the seventh-best restaurant in North America in the World’s 50 Best rankings. At Somssi, Kim has channelled the group’s high standards into her own deceptively casual concept. The restaurant’s name, pronounced “somm-shi,” means something like “time-honed skill” in Korean, and it earns that title. Dining there put me in mind of what baseball old heads used to call easy power: a display of strength and capability so practiced that it nearly looks like relaxation.

Na:Eun’s impresarios, Ellia and Junghyun (J.P.) Park, are also partners in Somssi, and the physical space is a long-standing Na:Eun joint, formerly the home of Acru, an Australian-inflected tasting-menu-focussed spot that fizzled out last year. With a bar in front, a hallway-like dining strip, and a cozy back room, the space feels more harmonious with Somssi’s easygoing à-la-carte offerings. Few things on the bistro-style menu look especially novel: you’ve got your pasta, your steak, your increasingly obligatory crudo of scallop (which seems to be rapidly outpacing hamachi as the city’s most predictable raw-seafood medium, and I can’t say I’m mad about it). But every dish gets a twist, or a zing, or a moment of cloud-parting clarity. The scallops here are sliced and pressed to create ragged edges whose tiny tears and ruffles wick up tart rivulets of chilled rhubarb broth, fragrant with makrut lime.

The menu, designed with J.P. Park, who serves as Somssi’s culinary director, is less overtly Korean than the restaurant’s name and affiliations might lead you to expect. Korean flourishes appear here and there—a mustard-greens kimchi adding an audacious sour edge to a classic bolognese; a fiercely peppercorn-y sauce, evocative of japchae, au poivre-ing a tender picanha steak—but dishes draw on a broad palette of influences. An enormous double mutton chop, rubbed with a sweet and aromatic spice blend, and split lengthwise like a scientific specimen to display its rosy pink interior, is inspired by Chinese cumin lamb. I loved a wedge of caraflex cabbage, roasted to tender sweetness, which arrived hidden under a fluffy pale-yellow duvet of custardy egg-and-crab sauce, rich with the earthy-sulfuric flavor of white pepper: it’s egg foo young, but silkified, sultrified (and now, tragically, no longer on the menu). You can still get your egg fix in fried form: a sunny-side-up specimen comes atop a comforting little bowl of mushrooms and curried rice, a bit bibimbap-ish, a bit Indonesian, the curry blend pleasingly heavy on the coriander. A quartet of Gulf shrimp, shells and heads intact but carefully deveined (this is a nice restaurant, after all), are serried on a swirl of smoky, corn-infused mayonnaise and doused in a gently spicy chile oil. Whether you use a fork and knife or tear the crustaceans apart with your hands, it’s a physically messy dish, in a way that feels intentional, a moment of animal chaos to bring the calculated exuberance of the rest of the menu into relief.

Beverage-wise, there’s a delightful focus on itsy-bitsy drinks: two-ounce cocktails and spirits, including a terrifically weird selection of after-dinner options. The head sommelier, Jenny Eagleton, guided me to a sip-size pour of a cherry-infused mead made upstate, with notes of lemongrass, rosemary, and piney resin. “Freaky, right?” she said. “But kind of beautiful, too.” It paired satisfyingly with a square slice of olive-oil cake, served with a tangy fruit compote and whipped cream, but my favorite dessert was an ice cream infused with White Rabbit, the Chinese sweet-milk candy, with surprisingly delicate, delicious results.

Shrimp with smoked-corn mayo and chile oil.

烟熏玉米蛋黄酱辣椒油烤虾。

Plenty of buzz seems to be accumulating around the cutesily named “Potato, Potato, Potato, and Caviar,” which features a pucklike croquette wrapped tidily in fried ribbons of potato and topped with an inky tiara of roe. I found the dish to be too much, in several ways: too much potato relative to caviar, too much crispiness relative to softness. (Better, if you need a tuber, to go for Somssi’s fries, which come in a brown paper bag so they can be shaken up with your choice of gamtae furikake or a kimchi-spiced cheese powder.) Above all, the overwrought thirty-two-dollar packet of luxury strikes a discordant note in a restaurant that seems, in every other way, to have no need for such clunky signifiers. It’s a dish that makes more sense outside Somssi—I mean literally outside, where this particular stretch of MacDougal is thronged with the TikTok-led, list-driven, clout-chasing hordes who nightly lay siege to the door of Dante, another World’s 50 Best honoree. (It is a spectacular bar, though the atmosphere has curdled, somewhat precipitously, with the arrival of the crowds.)

Helen, Help Me!
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Success in restaurants has always been a kind of curse, but the curse seems to have more intense effects now: every mediocre dessert shack commands a line, every reservation is unattainable, and the city—never uncrowded—seems to be, in certain social-media-anointed neighborhoods, as tightly packed as a rush-hour 4 train. Atomix, with just fourteen seats along its chef’s counter, has never been easy to book, but, in the age of reservation scalpers and oligarch concierges, getting a table there has become functionally impossible. One of the most wonderful things about Somssi is how far away it feels from all that noisy jockeying, even if its own tables do move pretty briskly on Resy. Kim is working the floor every night, touching each table with a hello or a smile or a friendly retrieval of a fallen napkin. Her easy power is as exciting as all the hype beyond the doors. ♦

The interior is homey without veering into kitsch.

室内温馨而不流于俗套。