Korean Temple Food: The 1,700-Year-Old Vegan Cuisine Chefs Are Flying In to Taste

How a Nun Who Grows Her Own Vegetables Changed How the World Eats

In October 2025, a Buddhist nun from a remote temple in South Jeolla Province traveled to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She cooked for 350 people in the dining hall. The menu included braised shiitake mushrooms, fermented persimmons, sun-dried figs, and a bibimbap built from vegetables grown in the temple garden. There was no garlic. No onions. No meat, no fish, no artificial seasoning of any kind. When she was asked how it felt to be at Yale, she said — speaking through a translator — that she must have been a student there in a past life, because everyone felt familiar.

Korean temple food served on gray stone plate with steamed mountain greens lotus root braised tofu and fermented vegetables

Temple food plating follows one rule: let the ingredient be exactly what it is.

The nun's name is Jeong Kwan. She has lived at Baekyangsa Temple since she was nineteen years old. She has no restaurant and no formal culinary training. She has influenced René Redzepi of Noma, Mingoo Kang of Mingles in Seoul, and Éric Ripert of Le Bernardin in New York, among others. When Netflix's Chef's Table devoted an episode to her practice in 2017, Korean temple food went from a practice known primarily to Buddhist practitioners and serious food scholars to a subject of international pilgrimage. None of this changed anything about how Jeong Kwan cooks. She still tends the same garden, ferments the same pastes in jars that are now over two decades old, and serves the same meals to the nuns and monks in her community. The world moved toward her. She did not move toward the world.

What Temple Food Actually Is

Sachal eumsik — temple food — is the cuisine developed over 1,700 years inside Korean Buddhist monasteries. Its origins trace to the arrival of Buddhism in Korea in 372 CE during the Three Kingdoms period, and it evolved through centuries of monastic practice into a complete culinary philosophy rather than simply a set of recipes. In May 2025, the Korea Heritage Service officially designated it a National Intangible Cultural Heritage, formally recognizing what practitioners and food scholars had long argued: this is not a dietary restriction system. It is a sophisticated culinary tradition with its own flavor logic, its own aesthetic principles, and its own understanding of the relationship between food and mental state.

The defining rules of temple food are better understood as a design brief than a list of prohibitions. No meat. No fish. No dairy. No artificial flavoring. And no oshinchae — the five pungent vegetables: garlic, onions, green onions, chives, and wild rocambole. These five are excluded not for health reasons but for meditative ones. Buddhist practice holds that pungent, stimulating ingredients agitate the mind and disturb the concentration required for meditation. Remove them, and the cook is forced to develop flavor through entirely different means: fermentation, drying, careful seasoning with hand-made doenjang and ganjang, the natural umami of mushrooms, the mineral depth of mountain herbs, and the slow patience of ingredients allowed to express what they actually are rather than what a marinade makes them.

What emerges from these constraints is a cuisine that has independently arrived at many of the principles that contemporary fine dining spent the past two decades discovering. Micro-seasonal sourcing. Zero-waste cooking — no rice grain discarded, scraps fermented into side dishes, everything used. Fermentation as a primary flavor tool. The foregrounding of texture and natural sweetness over salt and fat. Temple food did not develop these principles as innovation. It developed them as necessity, over a period of time that makes most culinary traditions look recent.

What Gets Removed, and Why

The absence of garlic and onions from temple food is the element that most surprises people who know Korean cuisine. These two ingredients are foundational to virtually every other dish in the Korean culinary vocabulary — the base of every kimchi, every jjigae, every marinade. A Korean kitchen without garlic is structurally unusual in the way a French kitchen without butter would be. What makes temple food's absence of garlic coherent rather than simply limiting is the alternative umami architecture it builds in place of those flavors.

Dried shiitake mushrooms provide the glutamate depth that garlic's pungency normally supplies. Doenjang — fermented soybean paste, itself aged for months or years in the same onggi jars that temple kitchens have maintained for generations — contributes savory complexity without aromatic sharpness. Perilla leaves, sesame, wild mountain greens called sanchae, and seasonal roots like lotus, burdock, and taro each carry specific flavor signatures that become legible only when the overpowering aromatics that would normally dominate are removed. The food tastes, paradoxically, of more things rather than fewer — because without garlic and onion in front, the secondary flavors have room to arrive.

Close-up of Korean temple food ingredients including lotus root shiitake mushroom and mountain greens on grey ceramic

Lotus root, dried mushroom, mountain greens — the ingredient list is short because it needs to be.

The plating principle follows from the same logic. Temple food presentations typically involve small portions arranged on grey or brown ceramic — unglazed, rough, visually quiet. There is no garnish as decoration. Each element on the plate is something that will be eaten. The negative space around the food is generous. The visual effect is of extreme restraint: this ingredient, in this portion, because it is enough. It is the same principle as yeobaek-ui-mi — the beauty of empty space — that structures traditional Korean dessert presentation, applied to a full meal. The plate says nothing except: here is what the season produced, prepared with attention.

The Ritual of Eating

Inside a temple, meals are eaten in a practice called barugongyang — the communal monastic meal conducted with four wooden bowls that nest inside each other, carried by each practitioner. The meal is taken in silence. Each bowl is filled in sequence — rice, soup, side dishes, water for rinsing — and consumed with complete attention to the process of eating itself. Nothing is left in the bowls. The rinse water is drunk. The bowls are dried with a cloth and nested again for the next meal. There is no waste because the practice does not allow for waste, and it does not allow for waste because waste implies that the food was not fully received.

For secular visitors, experiencing something close to barugongyang is possible through the Templestay program, a government-supported initiative that allows anyone to stay at one of the 130 participating temples across Korea for two to three days. Participants eat temple meals, attend morning practice, and experience the rhythm of monastic daily life. Around Seoul alone, 24 temples offer Templestay, including Jingwansa in Eunpyeong District and Bongeunsa in Gangnam — the latter one of the more striking contrasts the city offers, a thousand-year-old temple in the middle of one of Seoul's most intensely commercial districts.

Where to Experience It

The most direct encounter with temple food outside a monastery is Balwoo Gongyang, a restaurant near Jogyesa Temple in central Seoul that has held a Michelin star for multiple consecutive years. The name means "bowl offering," referencing the barugongyang tradition. The menu presents tasting courses built around the same principles as monastic cooking — seasonal, plant-based, no pungent vegetables — translated into a formal restaurant format. Lotus root pancakes, burdock tea, delicate tofu skin wraps, and fermented vegetable preparations rotate with the seasons. The environment is deliberately calm: low lighting, natural materials, the sound level of the room kept well below the ambient noise of the city outside.

Sanchon, in Insadong, takes a different approach — a more informal, traditionally decorated space operated by a former Buddhist monk, where the temple food is accompanied by live traditional music. The atmosphere is warmer and less austere than Balwoo Gongyang, accessible to diners who want the experience of temple-adjacent cuisine without the formal tasting menu context.

Korean temple food set with multiple small ceramic bowls on natural wood tray including barley rice soup and namul in morning light

Barugongyang — the ritual communal meal of the temple, eaten in silence, in the order the bowls arrive.

For those who want the practice rather than just the food, Baekyangsa Temple — in Naejangsan National Park, about three hours south of Seoul by KTX train and taxi — offers a temple food program with Jeong Kwan herself. Bookings open in blocks through the official Templestay website and sell out quickly, particularly for the programs that include a cooking class. The experience involves a full day of cooking alongside the nun, eating what was prepared, and staying overnight in the temple guest rooms. Several visitors have described extending their Korea trips by weeks after booking what they thought would be a single day excursion.

For the broader context of how Korean food culture developed the fermentation principles that underpin temple cuisine's flavor system, the Korean Fermentation guide covers the full tradition. And for an understanding of how temple food fits within the wider spectrum of Korean dining — from street food to fine dining — the Korean Street Food and Dining guide maps the complete landscape.

The Food That Knows Exactly What It Is

There is something specific that happens when you eat temple food made by someone who has been cooking it for fifty years. The flavors do not announce themselves. They arrive in sequence, each one distinct, and they linger rather than dissipating immediately. The lotus root tastes of water and mineral and a faint sweetness. The braised shiitake has a depth that keeps going after you swallow. The namul greens carry the season they were picked in — a slightly bitter, slightly grassy quality that would be masked by garlic in any other Korean preparation but is allowed to be itself here.

What Jeong Kwan has said about this is worth sitting with: cooking is not about technique but about clarity of mind. When she says that she thinks of the ingredients as part of herself, she is not speaking metaphorically in the way a chef might describe emotional investment in their work. She means that the condition of the cook's attention is an ingredient. That a distracted cook and an attentive one produce different food from the same recipe. That the practice of making temple food is inseparable from the practice of sitting still and paying attention, and that fifty years of doing both produces something that no amount of formal culinary training replicates.

The world's best chefs have been traveling to a remote mountain temple in South Jeolla Province for over a decade to understand this. Is there something you already eat — a dish, an ingredient, a particular preparation — where you have noticed that the version made slowly, by someone who has made it a thousand times, tastes different in a way you cannot fully explain?

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