"Culinary Class Wars" Star Chef Jung Ji-sun Picks Taipei's Zhongshan District for Sweet Nunu's First Overseas Location
South Korean chef Jung Ji-sun, who rose to fame on Netflix's "Culinary Class Wars," is bringing her Korean-Chinese fusion brand Sweet Nunu overseas for the first time — and skipping Seoul's suburbs or Tokyo entirely. Instead, she's landing directly in Taipei's Zhongshan District, with an opening set for August. The space spans over 300 square meters, and the Korean team is spending a full month training staff in Taiwan ahead of launch.
When a Korean restaurant brand picks its first overseas location, the usual move is to find a low-risk city close to home and test the waters. Jung Ji-sun didn't play it that way. Her Korean-Chinese fusion brand Sweet Nunu (티엔미미) skipped right over Seoul's neighboring cities and Tokyo, choosing instead to open in Taipei's Zhongshan District — in a space over 300 square meters. This isn't a cautious pilot location; it's closer to transplanting the entire Seoul flagship setup wholesale.
Jung Ji-sun is one of the few women chefs in South Korea making waves in high-end Chinese cuisine. She founded Sweet Nunu in 2020, and currently runs locations in both Hongdae and Gangnam in Seoul. What really put her on Taiwanese audiences' radar, though, was Netflix's "Culinary Class Wars." On the show, she served up caramelized silk-pulled dishes and spicy mala butter shrimp, advancing all the way to the finals and finishing seventh in Season 1. For Season 2, she switched roles to become a special judge, staying firmly in the spotlight.
The Taipei location's prep timeline hasn't been rushed: planning kicked off in March this year, renovations wrapped in June, and in July the Korean headquarters sent a team over to spend a full month training the kitchen and front-of-house staff. The goal is to replicate the Seoul flagship's food quality and service flow down to the last detail. The store will roll out a digital ordering system, but tableside service stays intact — a combination that pretty much sums up Korean-Chinese cuisine as a genre: old-school Chinese restaurant service rituals paired with next-gen restaurant efficiency tools.
The menu direction has been revealed, but the full lineup hasn't been announced yet. The brand says it'll keep the crowd favorites from the Seoul location while adding more modern cooking techniques and plating styles, plus handmade Chinese-style desserts made fresh daily by the pastry chef. As for whether the caramelized silk-pulled dishes or spicy mala butter shrimp that made Jung Ji-sun famous on the show will make it onto the Taipei menu — that hasn't been officially confirmed, though fans are hoping to see them show up.
Zhongshan District has already become something of a hub for Korean cafés, dessert shops, and Korean BBQ brands in recent years, and Sweet Nunu's arrival adds another Netflix-famous chef name to that growing list. The exact address and official opening date haven't been released yet — the brand says more details on the menu and reservations will be announced soon.
