A Rare Encounter
in Authentic Cooking
with Ven. Jeong Kwan
At the Monaco Yacht Show 2025 Captains & Crew Lounge, Maison del Gusto hosted the Korean Temple Food Master for a masterclass in stillness, balance and mindful cooking.
Luxury is often mistaken for abundance. Ven. Jeong Kwan’s cooking suggests another measure entirely: enough.
During Monaco Yacht Show 2025, Maison del Gusto welcomed the Korean Buddhist nun and cook to the Captains & Crew Lounge for an intimate masterclass on temple food. The encounter was not a performance of technique, but a return to fundamentals — season, patience, fermentation, and the discipline of cooking without ego.
A different kind of presence at Monaco Yacht Show.
The setting made the invitation even more precise. Monaco Yacht Show is a world built around movement, scale, and appetite. Into that rhythm came a cook whose work begins with stillness.
Ven. Jeong Kwan did not arrive to impress the room. She arrived with ingredients, time, and a way of seeing. Her practice, formed within Korean Buddhist monastic life, treats cooking as an act of attention — not a display of control.
Food shaped by restraint.
Korean temple food, known as sachal eumsik, is rooted in Buddhist principles. It avoids meat and the five pungent alliums, relies on seasonal vegetables, wild herbs, and fermented preparations, and asks the cook to understand the life of each ingredient before altering it.
What appears simple on the plate is rarely simple in practice. Sauces may take months. Ferments may take years. The discipline lies in knowing when not to interfere.
Moments from the masterclass
Monaco Yacht Show 2025
Captains & Crew LoungeA visual record of Ven. Jeong Kwan’s temple-food masterclass at the Captains & Crew Lounge.
What was cooked, and why it mattered.
A menu built around patience, fermentation, and the quiet confidence of seasonal ingredients.
- Date
- 26 September 2025
- Time
- 14:00 – 16:00
- Setting
- Captains & Crew Lounge
- Format
- Live masterclass & tasting
Event recipes
PDFRecipes from a Rare Encounter
in Authentic Cooking
Download selected recipes from Ven. Jeong Kwan’s Korean temple food masterclass at the Monaco Yacht Show 2025 Captains & Crew Lounge.
Ven. Jeong Kwan, Korean Temple Food Master Recipe
PDF · 2 recipes · English · Maison del Gusto archive
Ingredient Spotlight
Produce
Shiitake Mushrooms
Lentinula Edodes
- Origin
- Korea
- Season
- Autumn
- Producer
- Ven. Jeong Kwan
Food as practice
Not performance, but practice.
The knowledge does not become ego. It remains in service of balance. In most professional culinary environments, cooking is judged by innovation, rarity, and the ability to impress. Ven. Jeong Kwan’s cooking inverts all of it: the dish is not the point, and the cook is not the centre. What remains is attention — to the season, to the ingredient, to the people at the table.
The knowledge does not become ego. It remains, quietly, in service of balance.
On the practice of temple cooking
Maison del Gusto as curator
Knowing which encounters matter. And preserving them.
Maison del Gusto’s role is to understand abundance well enough to know when to set it aside. Hosting Ven. Jeong Kwan at the edge of Monaco Yacht Show 2025 was less about provisioning than about posture — a reminder that the rarest thing we can offer a community of captains, crew, and provisioners is not more, but the discipline to notice what is already there.
Questions from the masterclass
Stories worth slowing down for.
Encounters, producers, and the quiet craft behind what we provision — a few times a season, never more.
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