David Park

David Park is a Korean-American food writer based in New York who has been covering Korean and Korean-influenced cooking across North America for nearly a decade. Born in Seoul and raised in New Jersey, he grew up eating in Koreatown Manhattan and in the Korean communities of New Jersey and Virginia before beginning to write about food professionally — which means his critical reference point is always both the original and the diaspora version of it, and he writes about the relationship between them with unusual precision. He covers Korean barbecue, Korean fried chicken, dolsot bibimbap, and the newer wave of contemporary Korean restaurants that have emerged in New York and Los Angeles over the past decade — restaurants drawing on Korean culinary tradition while departing from its conventions in ways that Park is well-positioned to evaluate. He also covers Korean-Japanese fusion, the izakaya-influenced Korean bars of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and the broader Asian-American dining scene of New York. Before TastyPals, he contributed dining criticism to a New York Asian-American culture magazine and was the founding food editor of a Korean-American lifestyle publication.

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