Inspired by Michigan ingredients and memories of her mother’s cooking, this Best New Chef offers lessons in the history of Korean cuisine interspersed among layers of flavor and texture.
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"A lot of people have known since the age of 3 that they want to be a chef," says Ji Hye Kim, who owns Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "That's not my story at all. I was 30 when I started thinking about it." Kim grew up in Seoul, South Korea, on a steady stream of spectacular meals. Her mom was a talented and passionate cook, so in many ways Kim, now 43, took good food for granted. "It has always been there in my life." But Kim's mom would never let her help out in the kitchen, and at a certain point Kim stopped trying.

金的家人在13岁时移居新泽西。当她在2001年9月11日恐怖袭击之后毕业时,她愿意接受任何会赞助她的绿卡的工作,因此最终在医院接受应收账款工作。今天,金喜欢开玩笑说她从“医院到款待”。一时兴起,27岁时,她在特种食品部的Zingerman的Delicatessen申请了一份工作。vwin德赢ac米兰金说:“我想,当你30岁时,你实际上只是一个成年人,所以我有三年的时间搞砸了。”此举需要减少90%的薪水,但她立即爱上了这项工作,尤其是“能够谈论食物,与土地和与手工制作人的联系”。vwin德赢ac米兰

金正恩开始在侧面制作自制饺子,将其出售给镇上的亚洲餐厅,并开始考虑开设自己的一家餐厅。通过在Zingerman's的一项计划,她将自己置于“烹饪商学院”,并在Delicatessen的Prep Kitchen上及时在Zingerman的全方位服务餐厅Roadhouse的Prep厨房里工作。同时,金开始运行一辆食品卡车,为最终变成的基础奠定了基础vwin德赢ac米兰Miss Kim,她的实体餐厅于2016年开业。

Before opening Miss Kim, Kim went into "nerd mode" researching Korean cuisine using historical cookbooks. "I wasn't interested in what's being done now, or even what was done 50 years ago," she explains. "I wanted to look back a few centuries… to how my ancestors cooked." She also wanted to tap into the food she was raised on, where her mother made everything from scratch, and to emphasize local Michigan produce.

The dishes at Miss Kim offer history lessons interspersed among layers of flavor and texture. For the tteokbokki, rice cakes, on her menu, she turned to a centuries-old recipe that was served at the royal palace in Seoul. "It was considered a very luxurious dish because it takes a lot of rice to make rice cakes, which are much denser than rice—and rice is expensive." In Kim's version, batons of chewy rice cakes are crisped and tossed in a deeply savory soy sauce with silky shiitake mushrooms, a glossy poached egg, and seasonal vegetables. Pre-pandemic, she served several types of bibimbap. Most Korean restaurants in America serve a standardized version of the dish with julienned vegetables, an egg, and a dollop of gochujang. Kim mined regional differences, serving up a North Korean bibimbap, where the rice is tossed with luscious pork fat and topped with thick slices of pork belly, toasted seaweed, and a soy-based sauce, with a raw egg yolk in the middle. Kim looked to mountain communities for a recipe where rice and potato form a crust at the bottom of the bowl, which is topped with locally foraged mushrooms and served with doenjang, a fermented soybean paste that Kim bulked up with cashews for crunch. A third bibimbap, inspired by the eating habits of Korean monks (who avoid alliums, and only eat what is available within a certain distance of their temple) featured 100 percent local vegetables (with no garlic), multigrain rice, and a soy vinaigrette that remains a personal favorite. (She is eager to reintroduce these to the menu soon.)

There are few things that frustrate Kim more than the expectation that the food she cooks should be "cheap." Those same expectations are not placed on the Italian restaurant two blocks away that charges $22 for five pieces of ravioli in butter sauce, she points out: "People don't bat an eye at that." She believes that Asian food is undervalued in general, even though just as much thought, care, and labor goes into making it. Factor in the fact that Kim buys exclusively from local farmers, and pays her staff fairly, and offers benefits and safety nets like health insurance, scholarships, and massage credits, and the price of her food (entrees range from $14–$24 per dish) feels correct.

可能需要金(Kim)直到30岁才意识到这是她想要的地方,但她计划留下来。她希望有一天能写一本食谱,收集她喜欢的韩国历史食谱,并且她的目​​光投向了另一个更小,更快的操作,重点是韩国佛教徒的植物寺庙烹饪。在许多方面,金现在将其视为她一生的使命。“我只是在食物如何发展和人们的生活中起着很小的作用。”vwin德赢ac米兰

照片由塞德里克洛杉矶