Seattle's South Seattle College recently turned into a showcase for Korean seafood, as CJ Foods' culinary talent platform Cuisine.K ran a three-day K-Seafood program there from November 5 to 7, co-hosted with the Korea Fisheries Association.
The lineup mixed competition and hands-on learning. On day one, students battled it out in a K-Seafood cooking contest judged by chef Yeon-ju Lee — a Cuisine.K alumna who runs JULIEAT Catering and appeared on Netflix's Culinary Class Wars Season 1. Team Seoul Sisters (Foziya Robale, Deeqa Yusuf and Shreya Pradhan) took first place with a menu that pushed Korean ingredients well beyond their usual contexts: anchovy seaweed pasta, oyster bulgogi sambusa and black sesame macaron.
Day two saw Chef Lee and fellow Cuisine.K alumni demonstrate Soy-Braised Oyster Rice Bowl and Gim Pancake for culinary students, framing oysters and gim (seaweed) as ingredients with fine-dining potential. The final day opened things up to the public, with two hands-on sessions for local consumers and content creators who learned to make Oyster Mini Gimbap and an Oyster Sandwich — dishes designed to show how Korean seafood slots into everyday home cooking.
The program is part of a broader push. Cuisine.K is CJ Foods' platform for spotting and developing Korean culinary talent worldwide, running chef-led classes, pop-ups and competitions to turn K-food from a trend into a regular eating habit. The Korea Fisheries Association, meanwhile, is the implementation body for South Korea's Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries overseas market development program, and has been running similar consumer-facing events abroad to build demand for Korean seafood exports.
For travellers, the story is less about the corporate machinery and more about a sign of where food tourism is heading: Korean ingredients — particularly oysters and seaweed — are being actively marketed to Western audiences, and cities like Seattle are where that crossover is happening in real time. If you're a food-focused visitor, keep an eye out for Korean pop-ups, chef collaborations and seafood-focused classes in the city; they're becoming a genuine part of the eating scene. And for anyone curious about Korean home cooking, the dishes taught here are a friendly entry point — gimbap and oyster dishes are far more approachable than they sound, and most ingredients are now easy to find in well-stocked grocery stores outside Korea.
CJ Foods has serious reach in the US, operating through CJ Schwan's with 20 production facilities stateside and its bibigo brand on shelves nationwide, so expect more programming like this rather than less.
