I Ate at Gaggen — The Husband-and-Wife Kaiseki Restaurant That Just Won Seoul a New Michelin Star (2026 Review)

A friend who tracks Seoul’s dining scene more closely than I do sent me one message the morning the 2026 Michelin Guide Seoul & Busan dropped: “가겐 됐다.” Gaggen got it. No further explanation needed — in the small circle of people who’d been trying to book a table since the previous winter, that was the whole conversation.

I had booked in December for a table in March. That is not a typo, and it was before the star. Gaggen (가겐) — full name 가겐 by 최준호, styled internationally as Gaggen by Choi Jun-ho — is a ten-seat kaiseki counter tucked into the second floor of a quiet building off Apgujeong-ro 80-gil, and it has spent the better part of a year being the reservation Seoul’s serious eaters could not casually get. In 2026, Michelin made it official with a star.

Who’s Actually Cooking at Gaggen?

The name causes confusion, so it’s worth clearing up first. Choi Jun-ho (최준호) is not in the kitchen. He is the businessman who backed the project and put his name on it — not one of the chefs. The people actually cooking are a married couple: Won Jin-hee (원진희), who trained at Kurogi in Tokyo, one of the most quietly revered kaiseki restaurants in Japan, and Choi Hyun-ah (최현아), who came up through Kanda, the three-Michelin-star Tokyo restaurant regarded as one of the defining kitchens of modern kaiseki.

Even the restaurant’s name is theirs, not the investor’s: Gaggen combines 雅 (a) from Choi Hyun-ah’s name and 元 (won) from Won Jin-hee’s, read in the Japanese style. It’s a small detail, but it tells you where the actual authorship of the place sits.

What they’re doing at Gaggen is not simply importing Tokyo kaiseki wholesale. It’s kaiseki grammar — the seasonal logic, the sequencing, the restraint — applied to Korean ingredients that a Tokyo kitchen would never have access to. Spring brings a course built around foraged Korean wild greens (bomnamul). Summer shifts to ise-ebi (spiny lobster) paired with white asparagus. Autumn is a matsutake mushroom course. Winter turns to snow crab. The technique is Japanese; the pantry is unmistakably Korean.

Getting a Table

Gaggen runs a single dinner seating, Tuesday to Saturday, 19:00–22:30. Sunday and Monday it’s closed. There is a ten-seat counter and a small private room. Reservations go through CatchTable, and by the time I locked in my March date in December, the calendar was already tight — this was months before the Michelin announcement made it worse.

If you’re planning a trip to Seoul around a table here, book as far out as you can and be flexible about the date. The single-seating format means there is no lunch fallback and no walk-in option to fall back on if your preferred night is gone.

Walking In

The building gives away almost nothing from the street, which by now I’ve come to recognise as something of a pattern among Seoul’s best new openings — GiwaKang and Restaurant San both play the same trick. You go up to the second floor and the room opens into something warm rather than austere: a ten-seat counter facing an open prep area, wood tones instead of the cold stone-and-steel look that a lot of high-end Japanese-inflected dining in Seoul defaults to. It felt more like being invited into someone’s kitchen than being seated in a restaurant, which given that it’s run by two people rather than a brigade, is probably close to the truth.

What I Ate

The course changes with the season, but the sequencing follows a kaiseki logic throughout: small and precise at the start, building toward rice, closing gently.

Sesame Tofu with Uni, on a Heated Stone Plate

The meal opens with kkae-dubu — house-made sesame tofu — topped with a spoonful of sea urchin, served directly on a stone plate heated hot enough that the tofu keeps cooking at the table. The tofu itself is nutty and dense, the uni cool and sweet against it, but the detail that stayed with me was what happened toward the end of the dish: the underside of the tofu had caught slightly against the hot stone, and that faint char turned out to be the best part of the plate. It’s a small piece of theatre that also happens to improve the food, which is rarer than it sounds.

A Clear Soup with Fish Dumplings

A restrained course between the opening bites and the main sequence: a clean, very hot broth with delicate fish dumplings (eomuk-style, made in-house rather than store-bought) suspended in it. There’s nothing showy here — this is the course that tells you the kitchen can do the quiet things as well as the dramatic ones. The broth was some of the cleanest I’ve had in Seoul this year, no muddiness, no over-reduction, just clarity.

Kurogi Somen — The Signature Dish

This is the dish that shows up in every conversation about Gaggen, and it’s named directly after the Tokyo restaurant where chef Won trained. Cold somen noodles arrive dressed in a rich, savoury tsuyu dashi, topped with sea urchin and a spoonful of caviar. The three elements shouldn’t need each other — uni, caviar, and dashi are all intensely flavoured on their own — but here they layer instead of compete. The noodles themselves are almost an afterthought, a vehicle for carrying the sauce, and yet the whole dish reads as light rather than rich. I ate it slower than I meant to, trying to figure out exactly how the balance held together, and never quite did.

The Rice Course — A Full Spread

The meal closes toward rice the way good kaiseki always does: a full small spread arrives together, built around a pot of dallae (wild chive) sotbap, alongside soft simmered baby anchovies, a plate of tsukemono (Japanese-style pickled vegetables), a bowl of miso soup, and a neatly rolled gyeranmari (Korean-style rolled omelette). It’s the most explicitly hybrid moment of the meal — a Japanese rice-course format filled with Korean banchan-adjacent components — and it’s also the most satisfying, in the specific way that a good bowl of rice with the right things around it is always satisfying, regardless of how many Michelin stars are involved.

Practical Information

How to Get a Reservation

• Book through CatchTable, and book early. A single nightly seating for ten people, with no lunch service, means very little inventory to work with. I booked roughly three months out and that was already considered fast by the people I know who eat here regularly.
• Expect it to get harder, not easier. Gaggen was difficult to book before the Michelin star. Now that it has one, treat any date within a month or two of your search as a long shot.
• Have a backup date in mind. Flexibility on the night is the single biggest lever you have for actually landing a table.
• Ask about the seasonal course before you book, if timing matters to you — the menu changes meaningfully by season, and the ise-ebi summer course and the matsutake autumn course each have their own devoted following.

Why Gaggen Matters

Seoul’s fine dining scene has had a run of newly minted stars over the past two years — GiwaKang, Restaurant San, Escondido — and most of them share a similar shape: a chef who trained abroad, came home, and applied that training to Korean ingredients on a Korean fine dining format. Gaggen tells a slightly different version of that story. It’s a genuine two-person operation, husband and wife, cooking in a format — kaiseki — that Seoul has historically imported rather than made its own, and doing it with Korean wild greens, snow crab, and dallae instead of the Japanese pantry that format usually assumes.

It’s also a reminder that not every notable new opening in this city needs an eight-course wine pairing and a sommelier reciting vintages. Ten seats, one nightly service, two chefs who trained under some of the most exacting kitchens in Tokyo, and a rice course that closes the meal on something closer to comfort food than spectacle — that’s the whole pitch, and on the night I went, it more than delivered.

Frequently Asked Questions: Gaggen

Is Gaggen worth the reservation effort?

Yes. It’s a genuinely small, two-chef operation with real Tokyo pedigree (Kurogi and Kanda) applied to Korean seasonal ingredients, and the 2026 Michelin star reflects a level of consistency that was already earning word-of-mouth praise before the award. Book as far ahead as you can.

How much does dinner at Gaggen cost?

The course is ₩330,000 per person, dinner only. Corkage is available for outside bottles — confirm the current fee when you book.

Who are the chefs at Gaggen?

Won Jin-hee (원진희) and Choi Hyun-ah (최현아), a married couple. Won trained at Kurogi in Tokyo; Choi trained at Kanda, a three-Michelin-star Tokyo restaurant. The restaurant’s name, Gaggen, combines characters from both their names.

Who is Choi Jun-ho, and is he a chef?

No — Choi Jun-ho (최준호) is the businessman behind the restaurant, not one of the chefs. He backed the project; the cooking is entirely Won Jin-hee and Choi Hyun-ah’s.

What should I expect on the menu?

A seasonal kaiseki course built around Korean ingredients: think foraged wild greens in spring, spiny lobster and white asparagus in summer, matsutake in autumn, and snow crab in winter. The signature Kurogi somen — cold noodles in tsuyu dashi with uni and caviar — appears year-round.

How do I get to Gaggen?

Gaggen is on the second floor of a building at 19-1 Apgujeong-ro 80-gil, Gangnam-gu — a short walk from Apgujeong Rodeo Station (Suin-Bundang Line).

Looking for more of Seoul’s current wave of newly starred openings? GiwaKang and Restaurant San are two more recent Michelin newcomers worth knowing, and our roundup of Seoul’s six restaurants on Asia’s 50 Best 2026 covers the city’s more established fine dining tier.