When Rejina Pyo and Jordan Bourke went on their first date in 2008, she asked if he had ever eaten Korean food. Bourke shook his head. Pyo, 33, who moved to London in her mid-20s from Seoul thought, “Yes! He’s a clean slate.” Their second date was at a Korean restaurant – “and I made him drink a lot of Korean alcohol! It’s the best way to test out if it’s a weird person.”

“She told me I had to drink one shot of soju before every mouthful,” recalls Bourke, a 31-year-old from Dublin. “I wasn’t on the floor, but almost.” That meal led to innumerable more and eventually to Our Korean Kitchen, winner of OFM’s Best New Cookbook.

When they met, Pyo was a fashion student at Central Saint Martins in London; her elegant womenswear is now stocked in more than 30 outlets around the world. Bourke, meanwhile, was switching from a career in TV production to life as a chef. After training at Ballymaloe cookery school in Ireland, he worked with Skye Gyngell at Petersham Nurseries. He now mixes writing with consulting and pop-up supper clubs; before Our Korean Kitchen, he had written two cookbooks: The Guilt-Free Gourmet and Natural Food Kitchen.

Korean food, though, has become his great love. “The flavours are so pronounced,” he says. “There’s always an element of spice, sweetness, saltiness and then you’ve got all the sharper flavours cutting through it, with side dishes like kimchi and the pickles. There’s always garlic, soy sauce, sesame oil in pretty much in everything.”

“Ahh, the golden combination,” interjects, Pyo. Bourke giggles, “I’ve never heard it described like that, but it kind of is.”

Bourke’s first teacher in Korean food was Pyo, then her mother and finally he did stints in restaurant kitchens all over the country. When they started work on Our Korean Kitchen, the recipes were often personal interpretations of classic dishes such as bibimbap (mixed rice with vegetables and beef) and dubu kimchi (tofu and fried kimchi). Halfway through, however, that draft went in the bin. “We didn’t want it to be a trendy fusion cookbook,” says Pyo. Bourke adds: “There wasn’t that much written about Korean food. We had to give the authentic version first.”

Our Korean Kitchen could be seen a love story: of Pyo and Bourke as a couple; and of Bourke towards a cuisine little known in the UK. While Bourke fine-tunes most of the recipes, he still considers Pyo “the boss” of Korean food: “I always have to refer to her palate to make 100% sure,” he says.

Pyo pays Bourke perhaps the greatest compliment of all: “I shouldn’t say this but sometimes I think his cooking is better than my mum’s.”