WRG: As a celebrity chef of Korean origin who grew up in Argentina and who’s seen the world, what is your take on tradition? How does it affect your everyday life and your cooking?

Chef Antonio Park: Being Korean, I would say that respect is very important. We have a lot of respect towards elderly people. But traditions are changing. Generations are changing. We respect less. There is so much we can learn from people who’ve been here longer than us. When we’re younger, we think that we know everything. But the older we get, we realize how much we still have to learn and we become more humble. I also think that communities are important. So if I cook something, I don’t only cook it for my family. I cook it for my neighbours too because I think that it’s a great tradition to share a meal with people.

Living in so many different countries with so many different cultures, I’ve been in contact with many different traditions and they are all equally valuable. As a chef, I do what I do because I love to cook. Cooking for people is a beautiful thing. The media has helped us get a global perspective on culinary traditions. We now live in one world, a sharing world, and that’s a beautiful thing.

So if you ask me about traditions, and what they mean to me, I would just like to say this: we cannot forget about where we are coming from, about our youth, our education, and about respect. It’s great to have all this choice in the kitchen and in life but let’s not forget where we are coming from, our culture, our history.