Joining NANRO Next as a mentor, Venerable Jeongkwan is a designated Master of Korean Temple Cuisine within the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism. Ordained in 1974 at the age of seventeen, she spent nearly two decades from 1989 in residence at Mangwolsa temple in Yeongam, where she laid the foundation for the serious study and public reach of Korean temple cuisine; she now practices and passes on that tradition from Cheonjinam, a hermitage of Baekyangsa temple in Jangseong. In 2017 she appeared as the subject of Chef's Table Season 3 Episode 1, bringing the essence of K-temple cuisine to a global audience — The New York Times gave her the name "Philosopher Chef." World-renowned chefs including Eric Ripert of three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin travel to Cheonjinam to sit with her and learn. In late 2025 she was named chair of the Council of Temple Cuisine Masters in Korea.
Ven. Jeongkwan says of herself, "I am not a chef, I am a practitioner." Her cooking has no fixed recipe; each day, the weather, the produce, and the state of her own mind decide what will be, as she carries the energy that nature offers directly to the plate. She holds time itself as an ingredient — vegetables that have frozen and thawed through winter, doenjang and heirloom soy sauce aged seven years and more. The temple's exclusion of the five pungent vegetables is, for her, a lesson in taking less and setting down desire. And the temple's long-held practice of thinning, drying, and keeping — of taking from nature without harm — is where her sustainability sits. With that deepest root of K-cuisine in her hand, she joins NANRO Next as a mentor for the chefs still finding their own way to it.
