Mingles

The table

The window, at noon

Mingles is on the second floor of 19 Dosan-daero 67-gil, in Cheongdam-dong, Seoul. Mingoo Kang opened it in April 2014, and he built it on jang: ganjang, the soy sauce, doenjang, the soybean paste, and gochujang, the chili paste. His cookbook is called Jang. Before Mingles he cooked in Spain under Martín Berasategui, then learned Korean tradition from the chef Cho Hee-sook and the Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan.

In the room: walnut tables, green seats, plaster the color of rice paper, a photograph of an old wooden door on the wall. Ask for a table by the window. On the terrace outside stand onggi, the clay jars Korean kitchens ferment their sauces in, with a tiled roof among the trees behind them.

The meal opens with a display of the day’s produce at the table. Come at lunch. It costs ₩320,000 against ₩420,000 at dinner, on menus dated July 1, 2026, and keeps the same frame with a few courses fewer. Mingles serves lunch from noon and dinner from 6 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday, and closes on Mondays.

Gochujang

The red paste, three times

The first bites arrive small: a toast of seasonal fish with chamnamul pesto and two-year-aged kimchi, a slice of persimmon under Hanwoo bresaola. Seasonal raw fish comes with caviar made into jeotgal, the salted relish of Korean tables. At dinner, a carrot soup comes with burrata, sesame oil and sea urchin from Hokkaido. Then the chili paste starts its work.

The beef tartare comes with smoked eel and a plum gochujang. A seon of autumn cabbage and pear, laid in layers, carries caviar, omija and a cho-gochujang sauce. Later, a steamed prawn comes with a tomato sticky-rice risotto and a bisque reduced with gochujang.

On the July dinner menu, you could add French blue lobster with barbecue gochujang, for ₩90,000, or guksu, a dried-anchovy noodle, for ₩40,000.

Doenjang

The paste in the pastry

That tartare comes in a tart shell made with herbs and doenjang. It is the first clue that the brown paste is everywhere here, even where you do not taste it.

The menu card names where each jang comes from, the way other restaurants name their farms. For the doenjang and the ganjang, one of the names is Mingles itself: the kitchen makes part of its own.

Between the sauces comes the Mingling Pot, the dish that shares the restaurant’s name. One hot bowl of Hanwoo broth holds cabbage dumplings with beef, sea cucumber and shrimp fritters, kale dumplings filled with fish and kimchi, and a ribbon of egg with pyogo mushrooms. Its contents change with the seasons; the idea, a melting pot in one bowl, does not.

The mains turn to rice and fire. A seasonal fish is grilled under a crust of puffed rice, over a rice porridge. A chicken roulade puts samgyetang and fried chicken on one plate. Hanwoo tenderloin is grilled over charcoal, and pork wrapped in sirloin is smoked over a straw fire, with kimchi beside it.

All three

The dessert from the first day

When dessert is offered as a choice, take the Jang Trio. It has been on the menu since Mingles opened, from a time when there was no pastry team and Kang wanted to see what fermented sauce would do to sugar.

A crème brûlée is set with doenjang. Pecans are candied in ganjang. Puffed grains carry gochujang and a dusting of gochujang powder, with vanilla ice cream and a whiskey foam to bring it together. This autumn the menu also lists duteop-tteok, a rice cake, and a chestnut course.

At Mingles, the crème brûlée is made with soybean paste.

The meal ends with small Korean sweets: jooak, a small fried rice cake, a malted-barley macaron and hwanggeum-hyang citrus. For the glass, ask for the Woori Sool pairing. The words mean “our liquor”: Korean rice wines and spirits, poured course by course. The menu lists other pairings, from four glasses at ₩220,000 to a Selected pairing at ₩800,000.

Before you book

Two o’clock, Seoul time

Book on CatchTable, through the link the restaurant’s site keeps for foreign guests; it opens the English version of the app. CatchTable says Mingles releases its new dates at 2 p.m. Seoul time, which is midnight in New York in winter and 1 a.m. in summer. Have your date, your party and your card ready before the hour.

The deposit is the full price of the menu, and CatchTable describes the refund window as strict. Guests must be ten or older. Corkage is ₩150,000, for one 750 ml bottle a table.

Mingles holds three Michelin stars, by its own list of awards, and stands at No. 17 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2026, after No. 5 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2025. When you book, write your request for the window in the notes, and say whether anyone at the table avoids pork or shellfish: the menu uses both.