"For me, actor and chef are more like parallel universes now, similar in a mom and dad kind of way"
Actress Ryu Soo-young (real name Eo Nam-sun) stood on a lecture hall at Stanford University in the United States on Nov. 11 (local time). It was at the 'Korean Food Conference' organized by the university's Walter Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Institute (Director Professor Shin Ki-wook) and the Korea Foundation (KF).
The actor has been acting for 26 years, but on this day, he stood on the lecture stage as a 'chef' instead of an actor. He became a culinary influencer through his popularity on the TV program "New Restaurant," and is also known by the nickname "Eunam-sensei" after his real name.
"I still love acting and it makes my blood boil," but "I've been cooking on TV for four years, but two years ago, it became a sense of professional obligation."
"At first I thought of it as a side hustle, an extension of my hobby," he says of his interest in cooking from a young age, "but then it became important to me. It feels like more than a job."
"It's something that goes into your mouth, so you can't mess around with it," he said, adding, "You can do acting in your style, but you can't just do rice in your style."
He also said, "(Cooking) has become the most important thing in terms of what matters, because you have to cater to everyone and everything."
He also shared his frustrations. "You can't just do what you want to do," he said, "you can't just do what you want to do, you can't just do what you see on TV, and it makes my head spin.
"It's stressful to have to create a new menu because I've made all the dishes I think are typical," he said, adding that he has 290 recipes. However, "I'm lucky that there are more than 300 types of kimchi," he said.
"Park Ha-sun (his wife) also eats a lot of kimchi," he says, adding that "she eats a lot of it," and laughs that "we spent three or four weeks on the pork stir-fry and a week on the chicken ribs.
"I think cooking has already gone beyond a side hustle," Liu says, adding, "Even my little daughter knows me as a cook."
As for the pressure and obligations that come with being popular, he says, "Anything professional is hard," but he also says, "It's just fun. It's a happy moment, so I don't think you should complain."
"I haven't thought about it," he says of commercializing his cooking, shaking his head, adding, "It can be cool to make a lot of money, but there's still a tendency for people who think they're artists to be shy about putting themselves out there on the commercial front."
Next month, he says, he's filming a program about cooking abroad.
"I'm going to go to a rugged place and make something similar to Korean food with local ingredients," he said, "I'm going to take a few things with me, like (chili) peppers, and just whip something up with local ingredients." In September, he also said he was filming a drama for the first time in a year.
At the seminar, which drew an audience of 150 people, he talked about his philosophy on cooking and how he preferred cookbooks to comic books as a child.
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