Kitchen Confidential: Chef Corey Lee Discusses His Plans for Newest Restaurant Opening

How often will In Situ’s menu change?
It will change all the time because some dishes are only available for a very short window. For example, Matt Orlando at Amass in Copenhagen, he’s doing a dish with the tips of conifers like spruce and pine. It’s just the shoots, and those shoots are only available for a couple weeks. That’s when we’ll do his dish.

What does having three Michelin stars mean to you?
It’s just a great honor, especially for chefs of my generation or earlier. We came up in an industry where there was no Michelin in North America. I started cooking in the mid ’90s and at the time Michelin was only in Europe. Everyone forgets that it was only about 10 years ago that Michelin came to the U.S. and other countries. It was always this thing that was out of reach for American chefs. We traveled to Europe to experience what that Michelin star restaurant culture was about. Seeing Michelin now come to the U.S., and those accolades being attainable for us professionally, is still a little bit surreal.

What did you learn most from Thomas Keller when you worked at The French Laundry?
Thomas has just been an enormously influential person in my life. I really learned what it means to continue to evolve once you become the chef and a restaurateur. I think a lot of young chefs, if you ask them “What do you want to do one day?” I guarantee you, 95% of them will say, “I want to own my own restaurant.” But what happens after that? Once you’ve achieved the goal of being the chef of a restaurant and owning a restaurant, what do you do then? How do you make that restaurant better? How do you grow your business? How do you take care of the people that have been loyal to you? Those are the things that Thomas does really well and thinks about a lot, and I’ve learned a lot of that from him.

Are you still going to do a Korean casual restaurant?
Yeah, I’m going to do that. I’m not really in a rush. I want to do that right; I want to develop that concept thoroughly and that takes time. I originally thought that would be the next restaurant we opened after here, but the space for Monsieur Benjamin came up and it was just the right space for that kind of bistro. Then MOMA leapfrogged over the Korean concept. I think that will be next, but who knows? We don’t have any deadlines.