In November 2019, we teamed up Women Who Travel, a community from Condé Nast Traveler, and Healthyish, a site from Bon Appétit about feel-good food and living, to host a NYC breakfast with Chef Jenny Kwak of Haenyeo celebrating the stories of women who are working to make the outdoors space feel more accessible.
Inspired by Jenny's travels from Korea and her visit with the Haenyeo women, female divers in the Korean province of Jeju who risk their lives free diving for ocean goods on Jeju Island and are known for their independent spirit and determination and representative of the semi-matriarchal family structure in Jeju, we spoke with a panel of women who are working to make the outdoors more accessible.
Women from across NYC and from a range of industries — from fashion to journalism to design to public policy to culinary arts — joined us.
The outdoors has long been the domain of white, cis able-bodied men, and has often felt intimidating or inaccessible to those who don’t meet that description. Thankfully, there are plenty of women out there who are working to change that. We spoke with Shelma Jun and Sarah Knapp — the founders of Flash Foxy, a women’s climbing community, and OutdoorFest, a community platform to connect urban dwellers to outdoor recreation in cities, respectively.
We gathered at Haenyeo in Brooklyn’s Park Slope — Korean home cooking, inspired by our favorite and traditional dishes. The menu runs from the traditional, like seafood bibimbap, to the new-wave, like Korean rice cakes with Oaxaca cheese and chorizo.
Chef Jenny Kwak treated us to mandu (homemade dumplings), hobak buchim (honeynut squash pancakes), geyran jjim (steamed egg casserole with salmon roe and urchin), barley and adzuki bean rice, pickled perilla leaves, denjang chigae (savoy cabbage miso soup with clams), and toasted corn tea.
A special thank you to our chef, speakers, and moderator:
Jenny Kwak has been turning New Yorkers on to Korean food for 25 years. In 1992, she began serving the cuisine in the East Village at her first restaurant, Dok Suni’s, teaching guests about the flavors she’d grown up with. Her mother, Myung Ja Kwak, shared cooking duties. Jenny wrote “Dok Suni: Recipes From My Mother’s Korean Kitchen,” which was one of the few Korean cookbooks in English when it came out, in 1998. At her second restaurant, Do Hwa, she and her mother led customers deeper into unfamiliar ground. Each of the restaurants stayed open for about two decades, a long time in New York. What Ms. Kwak is doing in Park Slope isn’t all that different from what she has done all her career, except that by now South Korean comfort food has become comfort food for New York in general. For the past twenty years, Haenyeo women have always been an inspiration to Jenny and Terrence Segura, co-owner and partner. Her previous restaurants, Dok Suni's and Do Hwa, were owned by her mother who cooked and operated with a brigade of “strong women” who are fierce cooks! Haenyeo Restaurant further pays contribute to these women in the kitchen and also to the women who risk their lives free diving for the ocean goods on Jeju island. Haenyeo women, to her, are a reminder that without "iron-will" and the courage to face the difficult tasks in your daily life, you cannot survive.
Shelma Jun is the founder of Flash Foxy and the Women’s Climbing Festival. Shelma is a current Board Member of the Access Fund and in 2017, she was named one of 40 women who’ve made the biggest impact in the outdoor world by Outside Magazine. A leader in our community, she has written, spoken and presented on the importance of creating a climbing community that reflects and welcomes everyone who identifies as a climber. Shelma has a M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA. Raised in California but currently based in Brooklyn, Shelma can often be found plugging widgets into horizontal cracks at the Gunks or getting scared on granite highballs in Bishop.
Sarah L. Knapp is the Founder & Director of OutdoorFest, a community platform to connect urban dwellers to outdoor recreation in cities. Through their signature festival and monthly Mappy Hours, OutdoorFest is able to reach urban dwellers in over 10 cities in North America. Knapp is also the owner and publisher to offMetro, a green travel resource for urban dwellers wanting to get out of town, car optional. Her love for adventure has brought her to the summit of Africa, the countryside of Belarus and the ski slopes of Patagonia. She believes that the best way to explore a city is by bike and the best place to get know someone is in the outside.
a conversation moderated by
Lale Arikoglu is Condé Nast Traveler's senior lifestyle editor, and co-host of the Women Who Travel podcast.
FUTURE OF WOMEN is a unifying platform that creates original multimedia content and programming by, for, and about women around the world to openly look at the pursuit of being a modern woman. In 2018, we began collaborating with award-winning female chefs worldwide, from Los Angeles to Mexico City to Tel Aviv to Tokyo, to host a monthly women's breakfast series featuring game-changing women such as Olympic athletes, Emmy-winning producers, top Billboard musicians, and New York Times journalists on topics including architecture, sports, art, music, journalism, and human rights.
a special thank you to our partners
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