Suea is the cook and creative playing with her food in Brooklyn, New York
“Don’t play with your food!” We’ve all heard the deathless parental refrain. It’s rung out across dinner tables around the world for as long as there have been dinner tables. But why not? That’s the question posed – and answered, exquisitely – by Suea. Give her a follow on Instagram – @suea – and you’ll be served a smorgasbord of cute and convoluted comestibles, all the result of some very artful playing indeed: tiny tofu handbags; sugar cubes shaped like cherubs; an “egg surprise” with sticky rice and gamtae seaweed powder.
Suea – born in Korea, raised in the USA – is something of a multi-hyphenate: a cook-cum-creative, part artist, part chef, part social-media personality. At just 29, she has an impressive CV: as a young fashion graduate, she worked her way up the ranks at the cult fashion brand Opening Ceremony before landing a job as a creative producer at Instagram. It was around this time, during New York’s successive lockdowns, that she began posting her delicate creations online.
“I hate the idea that people think I’m a sourdough pandemic baby,” she laughs, sitting in her diminutive Brooklyn kitchen. “I’ve been cooking since I was a child.” She’s been doing it for a living too (at least in part) since 2019, when she founded Suea’s Dinner Service, an experimental supper-club-style enterprise that saw her whisking up weird and wonderful creations for diners on her roof terrace. “For me, having people to dinner isn’t just about the food. It’s about creating an interactive experience, which is what I was exploring with Dinner Service,” she says. “I wanted to curate the whole experience for people – not just what people were eating, but how they were eating it too.” It was at this time that she started fashioning her otherworldly butter candles, for instance, which guests dip their bread into as they ooze and puddle. “My friends went crazy for them.” Suea says many of her ideas come from dreams, but mainly she likes to think about what would be fun, what will start people talking. “I don’t come at things like an artist or from a particularly fancy place. I just want to excite people.”
Suea’s Cake Service soon followed, with Suea making use of the immense airbrushing skills of her boyfriend, Trung Nguye, to create the cutest gateaux in town, dreamily decorated with furry creatures in fuzzy focus. When she got laid off by Opening Ceremony, which went into liquidation in 2020 and now operates only online, “the food thing just snowballed”. Suea, by now working at Instagram, found herself inundated with requests for cake and cooking requests for editorial shoots. It wasn’t long – just under a year – until she felt able to quit her corporate career to focus on her food full-time. She’s now worked on shoots for fashion brands including Ganni, Barragán and Parade, while pushing her own projects.
Talking to Suea, it’s clear how, in fact, food has been a full-time focus her whole life. Growing up as an Asian child in Montana, eating her mother’s Korean home cooking, the young Suea became obsessed with American food – that is, all the stuff she never ate at home. “I remember feeling so left out,” she says, “because all my friends were eating hamburgers and pasta, whereas I was eating kimchi jjigae – again,” she laughs. “So I taught myself how to make all that western food myself.” Then something strange happened. Having gone to college, Suea found herself yearning for her mother’s Korean stews. Every holiday, she’d return home and ask her mum for recipes. Back at school, Suea’s friends would pay her for the ingredients and she would make them traditional Korean food for their packed lunches. “I was such a mum!”
Suea’s “return” to Korean food, as she puts it, owes much to recent trips to her motherland. “I go twice a year now, at least,” soaking up the culture and her family history. It helps, she says, that rice – the staple grain of Asian diets – is such a good building material. (You can’t really shape anything from spaghetti, it turns out.) Korean staples are at the core of her creations, though in every example they’re turned on their heads, fantastically metamorphosed. Imagine a kimbap stretching a metre in length; kimchi rice balls shaped like the plumpest summer strawberry; buchujeon pancakes made from Korean chives, as is traditional, but intricately woven, like a fine green fabric.
While her day-to-day cooking is “messy, normal and not like my social feed at all”, Suea says it’s important to her that everything she posts “looks super cute”. Without this aegyo aesthetic, her Instagram page couldn’t function. But since the beginning, Suea’s always been concerned about taste too. “I used to be terrified that people would think I was making stuff just because it looked good. I’ve relaxed a bit now. I think people under- stand that my food tastes nice, that I do care about that.” The challenge she faces now, she says, is that people see something she’s made online – that inari tofu handbag, for instance – and want 100 of them. “What they don’t realise is that it’s taken me hours and hours.” To scale it up wouldn’t just be financially unviable, Suea explains, the results would also be inedible, dried out and disgusting – and this she is unwilling to compromise on. “The food matters to me,” she says.
Given her determination, Suea’s whirlwind success seems natural. And while on one hand she seems almost disbelieving that in less than two years she has turned a side hustle into a full-time job, Suea also has one eye firmly on the future. “Dreaming big, I’d love to run a B&B one day,” she says – an immersive experience where soap, shampoo, furniture and breakfast have all been given the surreal Suea treatment. “It would be very cute.” We could have guessed.
Miche is a type of rustic loaf, typically baked in France. This recipe is best made with homemade ricotta and heirloom tomatoes, but it works well with the everyday versions too.
Several slices of miche
Extra virgin olive oil
Ricotta
Sea salt flakes, preferably Maldon
Zest of a lemon
A pinch of chilli flakes
Tomatoes, diced
A handful of coriander flowers
Start by grilling your bread in a hot pan with a generous amount of olive oil.
Prepare the ricotta by pouring out any excess liquid that may have gathered in the pot. In a small bowl, mix the cheese with a few glugs of olive oil, some salt, pepper, the lemon zest and the chilli flakes – I love Aleppo in this recipe.
After the bread has cooled slightly, spread the slices with the ricotta mixture, before adding the tomato chunks on top. You need to gently push them into the cheese so they don’t fall off.
Top everything with a sprinkle of coriander flowers or another gentle herb of your choice – basil, mint or parsley would work, as would micro-greens. Top with some flaky sea salt and another splash of great olive oil. Enjoy!
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