About once a year, Junho Lee’s halmeoni would ship pounds of soy-pickled perilla leaves from Seoul.

“Whenever [my grandmother] would send that over, we would scarcely eat it,” he says. “Just a little bit per meal at a time, because we knew that it was such a luxury to have.”

Lee was born in South Korea, but when he was two his parents emigrated to Gurnee, about an hour from any dedicated Asian grocery that stocked the white Korean radish—or mu—necessary to prepare a similar soy-pickled onion and radish side dish his grandmother supplied.

But there was a Mexican grocery nearby, where his mother discovered an acceptable substitute: “For the longest time I thought chayote was a Korean ingredient,” says Lee. “It wasn’t until I got into the restaurant industry that I discovered it was Mexica

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