The Michigan Daily sat down with Ji Hye Kim, owner of local Korean American restaurant Miss Kim, to discuss her culinary journey and the importance of Asian American food establishments in the Ann Arbor area. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Michigan Daily: Could you tell us about your earliest memories of cooking and how those experiences influenced your path to becoming a chef?
Ji Hye Kim: My earliest memories of cooking were really the only times that I was allowed to cook when spending holidays in Korea. Every New Year’s, all the family members will make dumplings. Then we did a similar thing with the Harvest Moon Festival, where we made stuffed rice cakes called “songpyeon.” But other than that, I wasn’t allowed to cook. I was curious because my mom is the best cook in the family, and she made everything from scratch. But when I asked my mom to show me how to cook, she shooed me away. So I didn’t really learn to cook from her, and that sort of shaped the path as a chef. A lot of chefs go like, “I learned how to make gnocchi at my nonna’s kitchen when I was five,” or “Our family always had a restaurant, and I used to fall asleep on top of rice bags.” None of those things happened to me. My path was more that I missed my mom’s food so much, and I couldn’t replicate it super easily because I never learned how to cook. So then I experimented with different things and was very much a self-taught cook, but it helped me be more open to other people’s experiences and recipes. I read a lot about Korean food, and I started collecting cookbooks, not just Korean cookbooks in the Korean language, but also Korean cookbooks that were first written in the 16th through 18th century. In the end, not having a cooking education from my mother or my grandmother was an opportunity in the sense that it gave me a good palate and an understanding of what to look for because I grew up eating it. I picked up things fast, but I didn’t feel limited by the family’s history.
TMD: How do you balance honoring more traditional Korean flavors or techniques with this concept of fusion at Miss Kim?
JK: We don’t call it fusion. I think the closest thing would be Korean American. Fusion is sort of like a dirty word in a sense that people who are doing European cuisine would look at Asian ingredients and then cherry pick what they think is interesting and use it, often out of context, into a European setup or ingredients or a dish, and then it just made it a little cooler and more interesting. We don’t do that. What we do is we pull from various inspirations, and I find inspiration from everywhere. So I pull from my family history, from my eating experience growing up and from my mother’s or my aunt’s cooking. We pull from ancient cookbooks that are reproduced in Korea, and I pull from my travels, trying different regional cuisines or Buddhist cuisines in Korea. I married that with my experience as a Korean American living in Michigan. All those things come together into what looks like a Miss Kim menu. I think it’s Korean American food, and specifically Korean American Michigan food. But I don’t necessarily think that it’s fusion, because we look into so many of those things, more than just cherry picking an ingredient and throwing it into a plate out of context.
TMD: What’s a dish on the Miss Kim menu that you feel best represents your identity or journey as a chef?
JK: We have “tteokbokki.” People mostly know it as a Korean street food; it’s rice cakes and oftentimes it’s swimming in some sort of gochujang sauce. That’s a more shallow understanding of that dish. But if you dig into it, it’s really a fun dish to study because it started out as one of the more luxurious dishes, often served for aristocrats and the palace. Rice cakes were expensive because you take a lot of rice to make not many rice cakes, and rice is precious. You take that dish, and then you study how that dish ended up being the cheapest street food that you can get, such as a scoop served at a food cart outside of Seoul Station in Korea. Then you can see that this is a dish that evolved with the story of Korean people. In the 1950s during the Korean War, Korea was very poor, and rice was banned from being turned into alcohol, so people started using wheat flour to make similar cakes instead of using rice because wheat was a lot cheaper. The urban legend is that somebody threw in gochujang by mistake there. So that’s how gochujang got introduced, when before, it was all soy sauce. And then they got rid of some of the more expensive ingredients and it became a cheaper food. So tteokbokki as a street food in Korea only came into play in the 1970s, and Koreans claim a 5,000-year-long history. So that’s a very, very, small part of the history. I feel like tteokbokki is the most reflective because it’s already a dish that’s evolving quite a bit, and we reflected these evolutions and married it with Michigan produce and my personal experience.
TMD: Miss Kim hosts a recurring event called the “Visiting Chef Series,” where a guest chef comes to Miss Kim for a night and crafts a curated menu for guests. What led you to establish that series, and how do you select chefs to be featured?
JK: We’ve always had visiting chefs every once in a while. This year, I made a decision because, last year, I was out of town a lot and doing these dinner events outside of Ann Arbor. But I work with so many amazing chefs, and the way that chefs like to have fun is to cook together. I wanted to bring some of that back to Ann Arbor, and I decided that instead of me going out in the world, I wanted the chefs to come to Ann Arbor and share their food here. Sometimes it’s a complete collaboration where there’s a little bit of Miss Kim and a little bit of the chef in every dish. Sometimes, the chef has never been to Ann Arbor, and I want the Ann Arbor folks to really taste what their food is like, so it’s their signature dishes or sometimes it’s in the middle, but we play it by ear depending on the chef. How I select the chefs is very organic: I meet them, taste their food and I like it, and I tell them, “You should come to my restaurant, and then we should do an event together.” It does tend to veer toward more of what you would call “ethnic food.” We had a Sri Lankan chef and an Ecuadorian chef come. I just keep it kind of loose, and we try to have fun and bring different flavors to Ann Arbor.
TMD: What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in the culinary industry, and how did you overcome them?
JK: I still get comments, but I get it less now, about how, unless the food is dirt cheap, it’s not authentic Asian food. The tyranny of authenticity was always there. That’s challenging for a chef who’s doing a country’s cuisine. It’s not just limited to my experience. It’s also what I hear from my Filipino American friends here, Chinese American friends or Japanese American friends; they hear the same talks like “This is not how my mom cooked.” I think there could be more appreciation of the food and understanding that while your experience is authentic to yourself, other people may have their own experiences, and it doesn’t invalidate each other. Also, in terms of the restaurant industry, the industry traditionally has not done the best with the staff. The pay has been low, benefits have not been offered and the hours are tough. I think there’s this idea out there that the food industry employs temporary workers. It’s like a summer job flipping burgers, but the reality is that people who are in the food industry have been full-time food industry workers for a long time. So the challenge is seeing not just fine dining staff but also just workers at any level as the professional, skilled workers that they are, instead of minimizing them into unskilled labor who do not get benefits or paid time off. So I think that there just generally needs to be an industry shift toward professionalism and taking care of the staff better.
TMD: How do you see Korean cuisine contributing to the broader story of Asian American identity in the United States?
JK: I don’t think it’s just Korean cuisine. Korea has spent a good effort and has received good success in the spread of Korean culture. Yes, it’s food like Korean fried chicken, tteokbokki or bibimbap. It’s Korean food, but it’s also Korean music or TV shows on Netflix. What I see broadly happening is that every time somebody eats Korean food and really enjoys it, or every time somebody watches a BTS music video or a TV show like “Squid Game,” it breaks down the stereotypes just a little bit by expanding that person’s experience. When I was growing up, it was unthinkable to bring kimchi or kimbap to a high school cafeteria. I’m hoping that it happens a little less and there’s an embracing of differences within each student or each person because there’s more exposure to Korean food and culture. So, I think it’s really good that Korean food has played a role in it, and I don’t think it’s just Korean food. I think Asian food in general is hugely popular, and I’m very pleased to see that.
TMD: Do you think the American or the Michigan culinary scene is becoming more open to more nuanced Asian American and Pacific Islander flavors?
JK: I think so, but I’d like to see even more restaurants. Before I opened Miss Kim, I felt like at many Korean restaurants in this area, everybody had the same kind of menu. Like there was, if it was big enough for a restaurant, there was a Korean barbecue section, a bibimbap section and the same appetizers. Maybe they’ll even have a sushi bar, even though sushi is not Korean. Lately, I see more diversity within the cuisine. There’s HanJan Pocha in Ann Arbor and there’s Noori Pocha in Clawson, so you start seeing different parts of Korean cuisine being highlighted. The specialty restaurants come along, instead of a catch-all restaurant. So to see these different kinds of food come up, even within one cuisine, is really great.
TMD: What advice would you give to aspiring AAPI chefs who want to offer foods from their cultures or related to their own experiences?
JK: Undertaking a brick-and-mortar restaurant is a huge commitment, so I would advise them to really suss out what they want to do and not jump into it right away. You can have your sites, like pop-up dinners, pop-ups at different restaurants or a food cart. You can do all that, but don’t limit yourself. You can go to different restaurants that really inspire you and then work there, just to really understand that running a restaurant is, first and foremost, delicious food, but it’s also good service, solid finances and good systems. You don’t want to burn people out as you’re running the restaurant and you definitely don’t want to burn yourself out. As a chef, you have to wear a lot of hats, so by understanding every facet of running a business, by working for other people and getting paid, you can do other things and you’ll have time to explore your own stuff with that security.
Daily Staff Reporter Eilene Koo can be reached at ekoo@umich.edu.
