Americans who weren’t born into Korean cuisine have discovered it in many ways and many locales over the past decade or two. Bulgogi folded into tortillas has been handed out through the window of a roving truck. Smoked kimchi has been draped over pulled pork between halves of a cheese-glazed doughnut to make an outdoor food-stall sandwich called the Chonut. Hwe, raw fish eaten with condiments that typically spread across an entire table, has been streamlined to one or two bites in a tasting menu administered by servers in sci-fi tunics. The pork belly dish bo ssam has been reimagined as a whole roasted pork shoulder that a gang of hungry people could use in a bonding ritual involving heads of lettuce, a platter of oysters and a pair of tongs.

More often than not, the audience for these items is young. Youth, in fact, has been a key part of the story of how kimchi and other dishes spread from immigrants’ kitchens to the Instagram feeds of diners without a single Korean ancestor. You might get a Chonut at Smorgasburg with your roommate, take down a bo ssam at Momofuku Ssam Bar with your friends from college and sit at Atomix’s U-shaped counter to celebrate your first anniversary.

Hwaban, which opened in Chelsea in August, is something different. It’s the modern Korean restaurant where you’d take your mother.

The dining room is spare, sleek and uncontroversial. The brick walls have a recent coat of white paint, and there is plenty of light by which to read the menus. The banquettes and benches have gentle curves and soothing neutral colors. The only vaguely menacing items in sight are the canteloupe-size eyeballs hanging on the walls, but they turn out to be high-tech speakers, and the cocktail jazz they play never rises above a murmur.