Corey Lee

Corey Lee is an American chef and restaurateur based in San Francisco. He is best known as the founder and executive chef of Benu, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in the South of Market neighborhood that he opened in 2010 and operated until 2024. Lee's cooking draws on classical French training and Korean culinary heritage, producing a style of fine dining that earned him recognition as the first Korean chef to receive three Michelin stars. Beyond Benu, he has developed a portfolio of restaurants in the Bay Area that span formats from modernist tasting menus to regional Chinese cuisine, shaping San Francisco's standing as a destination for serious dining.

Background and Early Career

Corey Lee grew up in a New Jersey suburb in a Korean-American family, where exposure to traditional home cooking left a lasting impression on his palate and his understanding of fermentation, preserved ingredients, and layered flavor. That early grounding, it turns out, would define the intellectual center of his cooking for decades. He pursued formal culinary training after high school and worked in a succession of professional kitchens before landing at The French Laundry in Yountville, California, the three-Michelin-star restaurant operated by Thomas Keller.

At The French Laundry, Lee rose to the position of Chef de Cuisine, overseeing day-to-day kitchen operations and the execution of Keller's exacting standards for technique and ingredient quality. His years there gave him direct experience with the infrastructure required to sustain top-tier fine dining: sourcing relationships with farmers and foragers, the discipline of modernist preparation, and the management of large kitchen teams working at precision. After departing The French Laundry, Lee traveled internationally with particular attention to culinary traditions across Asia, deepening his practical knowledge of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese cooking. He returned to San Francisco with a clear creative direction and opened Benu in 2010, at the age of 26 or 27, in the South of Market neighborhood.

Benu

Benu opened in 2010 in a spare, architecturally minimal space in South of Market, and it distinguished itself almost immediately from San Francisco's existing fine dining landscape. The restaurant's tasting menu, typically running between 13 and 20 courses, wasn't organized around a single national cuisine. It moved instead across cultural registers, pairing techniques drawn from classical French cooking with ingredients and references pulled from Korean, Chinese, and Japanese traditions. A course might reinterpret a Korean street snack with the technical vocabulary of haute cuisine, or present a consommé with the structural logic of a Japanese dashi. The effect was a style of cooking that felt genuinely original rather than fusion in any superficial sense.

Michelin recognized Benu with one star in 2011, two in 2012, and three in 2014, making it one of the fastest restaurants in the United States to achieve the three-star designation. Lee became the first Korean chef to hold three Michelin stars, a distinction that drew international attention to both the restaurant and to the broader question of how fine dining institutions in America recognized excellence outside the European tradition. Benu maintained its three-star rating continuously through its operation. The tasting menu was priced above $300 per person for much of the restaurant's later years, placing it among the most expensive dining experiences in San Francisco.

In 2015, Phaidon published Benu, a cookbook authored by Lee that documented the restaurant's recipes, sourcing philosophy, and culinary framework in substantial detail. The book served as both a record of the restaurant's first years and a statement of Lee's approach to the relationship between cultural memory and technical cooking.

Benu closed in 2024 after 14 years of operation. The closure marked a significant moment in San Francisco's restaurant history, ending one of the city's longest-running three-Michelin-star tenures. Lee indicated that the closure reflected a desire to pursue new creative projects rather than any failure of the restaurant's standing or finances.

Culinary Philosophy

Lee's approach to cooking is grounded in a refusal to treat cultural influence as mere decoration. His Korean heritage isn't a source of surface flavors applied to French technique. It's a structural presence: in the use of fermented and preserved ingredients, in the attention to umami-forward broths, and in a compositional logic that differs from European traditions at a fundamental level. That combination, worked out across hundreds of tasting menu iterations over 14 years at Benu, produced a body of work that critics and fellow chefs recognized as a genuine contribution to American cuisine rather than an act of translation.

Still, Lee's classical training remains visible throughout his cooking. Precision matters. The sourcing of ingredients, the treatment of proteins, the temperature control and timing that define modernist kitchens: these practices run through everything he has made. He's spoken publicly about the importance of working directly with local farmers and purveyors, and Benu maintained long-standing relationships with regional growers as a deliberate element of its kitchen practice.

Benu also became known as a training ground for emerging culinary talent. A number of chefs who later opened their own celebrated restaurants worked in Lee's kitchen, and his approach to mentorship contributed to a broader ecosystem of ambitious cooking in the Bay Area.

Notable Establishments

Lee's work beyond Benu extended to several other restaurants that showed the range of his culinary interests. In 2016, he opened In Situ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a restaurant with an unusual concept: its menu consisted entirely of dishes recreated with permission from celebrated chefs around the world, functioning as a kind of culinary exhibition space within the museum. The project won significant critical praise and reinforced Lee's reputation for conceptual originality.

Mister Jiu's, which opened in San Francisco's Chinatown, represented Lee's engagement with the regional Chinese culinary traditions of the Bay Area, reinterpreted through contemporary technique and a commitment to California ingredients. The restaurant occupies a historic building in Chinatown and has drawn consistent acclaim from local and national food critics for its approach to Cantonese-inflected cuisine. It earned a Michelin star and has maintained recognition as one of the city's more significant restaurants. Not everyone initially expected that level of critical seriousness from a Chinatown address, but Mister Jiu's made that expectation look narrow.

Lee's restaurants collectively employed hundreds of workers across multiple establishments and contributed to the South of Market and Chinatown neighborhoods as dining destinations drawing visitors from outside the region. The economic footprint of Benu in particular, operating at the highest price point in the city's fine dining market, generated associated spending in hotels, transportation, and nearby retail during its years of operation.

Awards and Recognition

Lee's three Michelin stars at Benu, awarded in 2014 and held continuously through 2024, represent the most sustained achievement of any Korean-American chef in American fine dining history. His distinction as the first Korean chef to earn three Michelin stars was widely noted in culinary press coverage and in broader discussions of representation and recognition within the fine dining industry.

Lee has also received recognition from the James Beard Foundation, which has recognized his cooking through nominations in competitive chef categories. The James Beard Foundation's award database documents his nominations as part of his broader professional record. Food & Wine magazine named him a Best New Chef early in his career, a designation that highlighted his significance at the time of Benu's opening. In Situ, his restaurant at SFMOMA, received its own Michelin recognition, making Lee responsible for multiple starred restaurants operating simultaneously in San Francisco at the peak of his output.

His cookbook Benu (Phaidon, 2015) remains in print and is considered a reference work for chefs interested in the intersection of Korean and French culinary traditions at a professional level.