A Greenwich Village Dining Room That Feels Far from the TikToking Crowd

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.