Chef Mika Chae has a name you might recognise. His cousin is Jung Eun Chae, whose traditional Korean “slow food” at her eponymous Cockatoo restaurant has made waves.

“She really inspires people, including chefs,” says Mika. “I never thought I’d make my own soy sauce, but I look at her and she does absolutely everything in-house.”

Culinary talent runs in the family. This Friday, December 15, Mika is adding to Melbourne’s burgeoning Korean dining scene with his first restaurant, called Doju.

The Korean-born chef has worked at Sezar and, briefly, Attica, but his time as head chef of Launceston’s Grain of the Silos was most formative in developing the concept for Doju.

“Usually, when you place a [vegetable] order in a big city, you just use an app,” he says. “But in Launceston, I had to talk directly to so many farmers… It changed me as a chef.”

An ambitious desire to cut out the middle man – and be on a first-name basis wherever possible with those growing what he’s cooking – means Mika has spent countless hours meeting potential suppliers at farmers’ markets in Coburg and Alphington, including Thriving Foods Farm and The Mushroomery.

What they pick will inform what he plates up at his Little Collins Street restaurant, his menu favouring hyperseasonality above all else. He’ll capture seasonal abundance by pickling and preserving, allowing him to serve a wide variety of produce year-round.

“My cooking style is modern Australian, but with Korean condiments and flavours, and using a lot of fermentation,” he says.

Doju’s first menu features house-baked sourdough spiked with the fermented chilli paste gochujang; Lakey Farm retired dairy-cow beef with desert lime and bugak (fried seaweed coated in glutinous rice flour); and a deeply flavoursome home-style dish of salted, marinated raw calamari alongside seasoned rice and Geraldton wax.

The 40-seat diner has all-natural timber furnishings, olive-green marble and delicate lighting. The partly open kitchen stars a wood-fire grill where Mika hopes to cook “next-level Korean barbecue” with cuts of meat he’s dry-aged on-site.

And the name? It’s a mashup of Jeollanam-do, the Korean province Mika is from, and meju, the dried, fermented soybean brick that many Korean condiments are made from.

Doju opens on Friday, December 15, Mon-Sat 5pm-10pm

530 Little Collins Street, Melbourne, doju.com.au