6 Questions with Ji Hye Kim of Miss Kim on Chef As A Second Career, Misconceptions About Korean Cuisine, & Prioritizing Fair Wages
Read Time: 10 min
By Sophie Braker
This article is from an interview with Ji Hye Kim of Miss Kim. If you want to learn more about her story, watch her videocast BSP377: Ji Hye Kim of Miss Kim on Korean Ancestors, Restaurant Pop-Ups, & James Beard Nomination.
Chef Ji Hye Kim opened Miss Kim, a Korean restaurant focused on food inspired by Korean ancestors made with Michigan ingredients, in 2016 in Ann Arbor. Opening a restaurant was never a part of the original plan for Ji Hye. She started in hospital administration before becoming a cheesemonger at Zingerman’s at 27 years old. Read below to learn more about her journey and her mission to educate people about Korean food and fermentation.
First restaurant job?
Speaking generally in the food industry, not necessarily a restaurant job, my first job was a cheese monger at Zingerman’s Delicatessen. I switched careers at 27. I learned all about artisanal producers and products and met people who made balsamic vinegar for generations. I like to joke that I got the job based on a feeling, on a whim and nothing else. I’ve been an immigrant ever since I came to the US at age thirteen. I’ve been a responsible Asian American girl. At age 27, I decided to give myself three years to fuck around and find out. That’s how I found myself in the food and restaurant industry.
The first year I worked at Zingerman’s was early 2008. I was in the specialty food department for two and a half years. I knew enough which means that I just knew what I didn’t know. I started working in the Zingerman’s prep kitchen. I worked at the restaurant for a little bit. I started staging around. We are an Ann Arbor institution and they are a great company to get into. They provide so much training, they’re passionate about learning, and are supportive of staff who want to do more. Eventually I got onto the path to partnership.
What’s a food / drink you always have on hand at home?
I have three things all the time. The first is rice, medium to short grain. I have to get it extra fancy for me. Sometimes multigrain but usually not. It’s not weird to have multiple kinds of rice in the house. You want a different rice for far Eastern Asian food. You want a different rice for South Eastern Asian food. You want a different rice for risotto, for paella. It's the soul and the basis of Asian cooking. I have dried and roasted seaweed. It’s already ready to go, already seasoned. And I always have Ortiz canned tuna.
Chefs don’t cook at home. I have nothing in my fridge. I have seasonings, the three mother sauces. What I end up eating is usually just rice and some quick pantry stuff. Ortiz tuna is delicious right out of the can. You can see the fish. It's not a mess of mystery fish. It’s actually aged tuna fish. I have no shame about eating it out of the can with my chopsticks over my rice and seaweed. Rice is just the base. You can have as much variety as you want on top.
What's a common misconception about Korean cuisine you wish more people understood?
I think in the United States up until recently it was considered a monolith like a spicy Korean food. It looks the same everywhere. I don’t think that’s true at all. People think that if it’s not that monolithic idea of Korean food that’s spicy then it’s not authentic. That’s a misconception that has to be changed. Korean food is incredibly diverse and is very different from region to region. We have a long history of Buddhist cuisine that isn’t that spicy at all. We have over two hundred types of documented kimchi for example. That’s documented so you don’t know what someone’s grandmother is cooking in the country back there somewhere. If a Korean American kid is putting water in their rice, throwing some hotdogs in there, and eating it with some chili oil, I don’t think you should be able to tell the kid that that’s not Korean enough because he’s too American. All these ideas that Korean is a certain thing, I think that’s a too simplistic way of looking at the cuisine.
Why is fermentation so critical to your culinary approach?
It’s endlessly interesting. It’s like a live product that has one life and then it’s not quite dead yet. It’s like a zombie product that evolves in personality. You think it’s one product but you can eat it the first week, or the first month, or the first year and then the flavor is different, the texture is different, the use is different. It gives you endless variety. For practical reasons, if you have fermented sauces, pickles, or kimchi in your fridge, I think all the work is already done for you. All the complexities are already built in. Then you can go to your rice bowl in five minutes and have the most amazing complex textures and flavors. It could be spicy. It could be tart. It could be effervescent. For practical reasons, I think it is a must have item for any cook. You can make it as intense as possible with lots of fish sauce or you can be as sly as you like by putting more fermentation in there.
I’m not a classically trained chef. I learned a lot from cookbooks. If you look at a lot of the old Korean cookbooks, the older the cookbook, the more fermentation plays more and more prominently in their recipes. The oldest cookbooks I could find from the 16th century were all about the preservation of grain in the form of alcohol and the preservation of vegetables in the form of pickling. There were no fridges or freezers or produce getting shipped from other countries. I think the possibilities are endless.
What's one thing you wish you knew before opening your restaurant?
There’s so many. I could literally pick a category. The one thing I will say is don’t sweat the small stuff. You didn’t go into the restaurant industry because you thought it would be super easy, did you? If the garbage disposal isn’t working…It’s okay, small stuff. If someone leaves and only gives you one week notice, it’s going to be tough right now but it’s small stuff. You expected it to be hard, didn’t expect it to be easy. Don’t get bogged down by the daily trials and tribulations. If you have a bigger vision then the smaller stuff is just stepping stones to get there.
How are you prioritizing fair wages, benefits, and equity at Miss Kim?
We baked it into our profit and loss statement and financial statement from the opening. I think that’s easier than trying to switch halfway through because things are already in motion, like people are already getting paid. So starting it from the beginning was sort of a lucky coincidence.
Think of it as any other expense. As restaurateurs, sometimes we think that it's easier to cut labor, send someone home early or pay them less. But if you think of it as any other ingredient, if that ingredient is more expensive, then you raise the price and make the service really amazing. You find a way to cut costs elsewhere to make that whole mix work.
The practical solution really is a mix of a lot of things. For example, Michigan allows tip shares. Some states don’t. Then you can come up with some sort of combination with you and your staff. For us, we started as a no tip and higher base wage. Our guests really did want to leave something even if the base wage was higher so we went back to tips with the understanding that the staff doesn’t rely for 95% of their income on tips only. So then when the guest tips, it’s really a show of gratitude for the great service they received.
Other people do service charges. There’s legal rules for how to do tip shares that’s different for service charges. So there’s a little room to maneuver. Finding what works for you is key. More importantly, I thought that doing a higher wage - one fair wage - was really tough for a couple other reasons. Even the servers didn’t really know what it was. Not a lot of people were doing it. There was such a stigma with tip theft or wage theft. If servers are getting tip credits then there’s no way that owners should have any say in that.
Two things can happen. First, either the market needs to catch up to paying the people who are in the restaurant industry and treating them like the professionals that they are. There are a lot of soft skills and multitasking, things that might not look good on resumes or be valued by society and the market, but that go into being a really good server or cook. The society and the market need to value and pay the people who are in the industry like the professionals that they are.
Or second, the law needs to change to disallow such a small minimum wage in general and then do away with the tip credit. With the pandemic and staff shortage, these things are happening concurrently. Due to the staff shortage, the market dictated that we need to pay people more. We can’t keep paying people sub-minimum wage or sub-living wage and expect them to come back to work. Especially if the work environment is not safe. Support for higher minimum wage and fair wage has been growing. I think it will be good for everybody as people continue to do this for the industry as a whole.
I think the US in general has a skewed perception of the value of food and how much it is supposed to cost. That customer perception needs to change. It costs a lot to have a happy environment and healthy financials for people who work in the restaurant and who run the restaurants. It takes money to have something really tasty put in front of you. You can’t expect that with $10 an hour, with no health insurance, and people needing to work three jobs just to make rent.
Ji Hye Kim is the award-winning chef/owner of Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, MI. Named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs of 2021 and a James Beard Award Outstanding Chef semifinalist, Ji Hye aims to broaden the understanding of Korean cuisine through her cooking. At her acclaimed restaurant Miss Kim — named one of Ann Arbor’s “Most Essential Restaurants” by Eater — her seasonal menu is inspired by ancient Korean culinary traditions, and adapted with local Midwestern ingredients.
Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Ji Hye was introduced to cooking by her mother, a talented home cook who would make large batches of kimchi every fall with seasonal vegetables, dumplings for their annual New Year’s parties, and rice cakes for the mid-autumn harvest festivals. When Ji Hye was a teenager, her family immigrated to New Jersey, and Ji Hye went on to study political science and economics at the University of Michigan, before pursuing a successful career in hospital administration. In 2008 at 27 years old, Ji Hye decided to switch to hospitality and immediately immersed herself in the industry, training across the storied Zingerman’s businesses and the Rome Sustainable Food Project. She launched her first business, a Pan-Asian food cart named San Street, which she operated for four years, in partnership with Zingerman’s.
In 2016, Ji Hye opened her first restaurant Miss Kim, which features a menu inspired by ancient Korean recipes and culinary traditions from her family, while highlighting bountiful and seasonal Midwest ingredients.
Additionally, Ji Hye is committed to prioritizing fair wages, benefits and equity in the industry, and has been admitted and completed programs like James Beard Chef Boot Camp for Policy Change and Food Lab Detroit’s Fellowship for Change in Food and Labor.
