My Korea | Hooni Kim
My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes
By Hooni Kim
with Aki Kamozawa
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.
Hooni Kim: Hi, my name is Hooni Kim and I have just written My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes.
Suzy Chase: As a Korean chef, you're constantly thinking about Korean food and its place in American culinary culture. You have two restaurants here in the city, Danji and Hanjan. Danji received a Michelin star in 2011 and 2012. The first ever Korean restaurant to receive a Michelin star. That is extraordinary.
Hooni Kim: Oh, thank you.
Suzy Chase: So, now here we sit in the epicenter of the pandemic and life's been turned upside down. We have a broad sense of what's happening in the restaurant industry, but it would be so great to hear how you and your two restaurants are dealing with the Coronavirus situation.
Hooni Kim: You have caught me at a very sort of tumultuous time, not just me, but all the chef friends that I know and all the restaurant owners. I think we are now three weeks in. I think next week is the fourth week of this situation. I will let you know that Danji, which was the restaurant that you were talking about receiving the first Michelin star for a Korean restaurant is right in the middle of the Theater District and we closed as soon as the theaters closed, which was two days before the city mandate that all restaurants had to close for in dining. So Danji hasn't been open for a month now. Fortunately my other restaurant, Hanjan, we were able to pool our resources, my chefs, people on salary that who have been with me for eight ... my manager at Danji's over nine years.
Hooni Kim: We understood that ordering food to go was going to be very common, but I personally and a lot of my friends didn't want to order a big meal every single day, two, three times a day to go out and eat. So what we did was figure out a bunch of Korean dishes that held well in the refrigerator and the freezer and we sort of made a meal kit for a family of four that could last two, three meals. And we decided to sort of sell that. And I would do all the deliveries myself. I still do. And we started that right away, even before the restaurants closed because we knew this was going to happen. And I think the first day we sold 10 and we were very proud. We were so happy that week we ended up selling about 80. I had to hire more staff to cook more because the following week we sold 100. Last week we sold 130 and we finally figured out that I can only deliver 30 a day and that's the maximum that I could personally deliver. So this next week we are capping it at 150 and we have just sold out yesterday of this entire week.
Suzy Chase: Oh no, I was going to order.
Hooni Kim: Well, no, I got your email yesterday so you're in it. And I didn't reply because I hadn't replied to anybody else. But yes, you're on the list. And we did sell out yesterday. Yeah.
Suzy Chase: That is awesome.
Hooni Kim: Thank you. I mean it was my mother and my manager, they suggested it. I thought it was a great idea and when we started it was just four people. Now we have eight people working at the restaurant. So we have staff that's making money in this situation. And that's I think the biggest sort of pride that I have.
Suzy Chase: You know, it's almost like your version of home food or what do they call it in Korean, Jip Bap
Hooni Kim: Jip Bap yeah.
Suzy Chase: It's kind of for your version of that.
Hooni Kim: Yes. You know, a lot of Korean food the traditional kind sits well in the fridge. All the banchans are meant to sort of, you make it once and you eat for a week. Kimchis can last months and years. Even the stews, they taste better the second day. So, it's more delicious when I make it and then deliver it later in the night and they eat it then or the next day it actually tastes better because the flavor set more, they settle more, they meld more, the soy sauce, any sort of fermented soy, soybeans, those sauces develop more through time after it's cooked. Every week we change our menu and I study the dishes that might hold better or even become better once the food is delivered. So, that's been interesting. But that's sort of what we're going for. The real traditional Korean foods that Koreans consider [foreign language 00:05:07] that can hold well in a fridge and a family can enjoy for two, three days. That's the whole point.
Suzy Chase: So what's the best way we as a consumer can help you and other restaurant stay afloat?
Hooni Kim: You know, I don't know. A lot of restaurants are selling gift certificates now and they're not free because we sell too much of it now and we spend that money later on. Our revenue's going to fall because of those gift certificates. It's a very short term sort of fixed. But I don't know if that's really going to help us in the long run. I'm also not comfortable asking for handouts. You know, I think a lot of restaurants are asking for freebies, but I just don't feel comfortable.
Hooni Kim: I just feel like nothing is free in this world and I've never taken a handout ever running my restaurants and making sure my staff is paid fairly. And it just takes a lot for me to go that route. The reason why I decided to do these deliveries and the reason why I personally do the deliveries is because I want this to grow so that I can hire all my staff back even if they're not making as much money as they did before we'll get there. As long as my restaurants reopen, I can hire all of them back and with time they will get to where they were before. And that is my goal. But asking my customers who have enjoyed supporting us this whole time for a freebie, for me, I'm just a little uncomfortable.
Hooni Kim: So to answer the question, how can you help us? I think the best way to help us really is as soon as our restaurants are ready to open for you to come flooding back. I'm sure many people are sick and tired of ordering delivery food or even cooking at home and are just itching and wanting to go out to restaurants, which we took for such granted going to a bar and sitting down ordering a beer. Wow, that sounds so good now.
Suzy Chase: There's a picture in the cookbook of, I think it's Hanjan, it's your other restaurant that's like a pub and I was just staring at it. All the people were just sitting right next to each other drinking, eating. It felt like a lifetime ago when we were all doing that.
Hooni Kim: And that's what worries the most. Most restaurants in New York City are built to sort of crowd people in. Right now, that's very uncomfortable and for a restaurant to function even after we open at 50% of capacity because that's sort of the physically safe thing to do, we're not built for that. We will fail. We will fail within two weeks if we don't get very close to the numbers that we were doing because we were making 5% margins anyway. If we get a 20% drop in revenue, we're done.
Hooni Kim: That is what worries me the most. This culture of staying away, being apart, the social distancing, if that carries over to the restaurants we're done, unless you're a very fine dining restaurant that charges $300, $400 per person who can sort of afford to social distance tables. 90% of New York City restaurants aren't designed that way. We are designed to pack people in because real estate is very expensive, not just real estate. Everything is very expensive here and even with that, our budgets being 5% at most, 10% I'm just very afraid that we might not go back to ... or it will take a lot of time to go back to where we were a month ago.
Suzy Chase: Well, I know we're all rooting for you and we're here to support you any way we can.
Hooni Kim: Thank you very much.
Suzy Chase: So now moving onto the cookbook.
Hooni Kim: Wow, that was depressing, huh? I'm sorry.
Suzy Chase: To happier times. Your cookbook, My Korea, is deeply personal and heavily researched. And when I say heavily, I mean it took you seven years to write. Why so long?
Hooni Kim: To be perfectly honest, when I was first approached to write this cookbook, I had just opened on Danji, it was my first year. Basically what they said was my menu just read like the chapters. So I thought that's one of the things that when you become a chef, you do. You write a cookbook. So I said, "Sure." Little did I know that I didn't have the story to share. The story that I shared, everything was at Danji. A lot of the things you couldn't put into words. So the story of Danji, a story of me, wasn't a good book. And my first editor pointed that out. You know, we all have writers because we just don't have the time or the skills to write a book. I am not a very good writer or I wasn't. I'm much better now.
Hooni Kim: I'm still not a good writer, but much better than when I first started. And I thought the process would be, I tell stories and the writer writes it. Not the best way. So by the third time, my first two manuscripts were rejected. They weren't good enough for my editor. The third time, I wrote it myself and my writer basically fixed what I wrote, grammatically, helped me write all the recipes because I am used to describing how to cook to my cooks, not to home cooks. So fixed a lot of the recipe lingo and having to write this myself just changed what I wrote. Instead of sort of sharing my stories, I first had to sort of look within and find what is my story. And that's why I went really back to my first memories of liking food. And to be honest, I had forgotten a lot of the stories that I write about when I was a kid.
Hooni Kim: It wasn't a part of my first two manuscripts. When I started writing the book, memories from 35 years ago, 40 years ago, came alive again. Yeah, I mean, starts right with the intro. I go way back from my first memory of food, which was in the island of Soando and Busan, eating the rice cakes off the street and that is my first memory of food and that's where we start.
Suzy Chase: Do you think you can credit Maria Guarnaschelli with tapping into something inside of you to really dig deep and get these memories?
Hooni Kim: Completely? Maria Guarnaschelli wasn't able to finish the book because she retired right before we were able to go into print, but she would not let me, allow me to publish my first two versions, which I thought they were good books, but so relatively lesser than what I was able to write when I wrote it. And it's not even the difference of writers because the second manuscript, I have the same writer as this manuscript or this book, the published book. So it wasn't the writer, it really was just me sitting down and looking within and trying to remember why I started cooking, how, and I would've missed all that out if Maria Guarnaschelli would have just went ahead and published a decent book, but not the best book that I could write. So I still thank her.
Suzy Chase: Speaking of food memories, can you tell us about your first taste memory with Korean street food?
Hooni Kim: Yes. It was in Busan. I must've been four years old and this was when I had come back to Korea to see my maternal grandmother living in Busan. My cousins are all older than me and they were used to the Korean street food. They didn't think that I would like spicy food, so they would let me partake. But one day they let me and, and it was spicy rice cakes, tteokbokki. And at that time for one penny, you got a toothpick.
Hooni Kim: And with that toothpick you had to choose because it was rice cake and fish cake that you could pick one. And I remember taking the rice cake because it was called rice cake. So I thought the rice cake must be better. Tried it and the flavors just exploded in my mouth. It was uncomfortable. Too much flavor for a four year old. It was spicy, salty, sweet, and the gooey, soft texture almost just melting in your mouth and ... it's the first time I had rice cakes. It was actually the first time that I had something spicy that I really enjoyed. You know, that was my introduction to a Korean street food 44 years ago.
Suzy Chase: And I think it was a lot for you to taste because weren't you living in London at the time?
Hooni Kim: Yes. I had moved to London when I was three years old with my mom and I was actually attending boarding school at that time, three hours away from London. So we weren't used to eating anything spicy. I remember I was the only Asian in my boarding school and I was the only Asian in the town. And we would take field trips to town and these old ladies would come around touching my hair because they had never seen straight black hair before. This was in the 70s. So this was a long time ago and it started when I was four. But every summer my mom would send me back to Korea just because she didn't want me to lose sight of where I was from, my culture. My grandmothers were still alive from both my mom and my father's side. So they needed to see me.
Hooni Kim: So every summer until even after high school, when I started college and it was basically up to me to decide myself, summer vacations, I would end up going to Korea because it was habit. I enjoyed it. The Korean food has always been different with ingredients grown in the Korean terroir, Korean food as good as it is in the US just doesn't compare to Korean food eaten in Korea.
Hooni Kim: I knew there was a difference between Korean food in Korea, Korean food in the US and I wanted to bring the Korean ingredients to the US to really show New Yorkers, Americans, this is the Korean food that I know. This is my Korea. And that's what I wanted to share. And Danji was born.
Suzy Chase: So when you realized that there was a difference between Korean food here and Korean food in Korea, what were some of the differences you saw between like Koreatown and the food from Korea?
Hooni Kim: You know, 40 years ago, food in Korea didn't have many chemicals. There weren't preservatives. The trade wasn't going on. It was more expensive to bring vegetables from China or Japan than to grow in your country, which is completely the opposite now, for most countries. Local produce was not more expensive. It was cheaper and that's all you used. Preservatives were expensive, so buying canned sauces only rich people could do that. MSG was so expensive in the 70s that only rich people could sort of use MSG. So all of these chemicals, which we find in fast food, cheap food these days, Koreans didn't cook with them until late 80s so the food that I know that I remember, the Korean food that I fell in love with, where just what we consider now fine dining, local produce that doesn't have preservatives, pesticides, flavor enhancers, just all natural food. That's still what I consider real Korean food.
Suzy Chase: I want to hear about your second taste memory and gim your favorite food to eat when you visited your paternal grandmother?
Hooni Kim: Yes. Wow. So my mother used to, not even joke, but she would say, "Your paternal grandmother lives in the furthest place on earth." And what she meant was to get there from both New York and London you take a plane and back then there were no direct flights. It was too long. So you'd stop at Anchorage, Alaska, for a couple hours to refuel, and then you couldn't fly over the Soviet union because of the Cold War. So instead of going the fast route, you would have to go all the way around. Basically what is a 14 hour flight used to take 20 hours with a stop in the middle.
Suzy Chase: Oh, my God.
Hooni Kim: So that's not all because then you arrive in Seoul and then Korean transportation back then wasn't as good as as it is now. So from there on we would take a little, local plane to a city called Quanzhou an hour. From there on, we would have to take a bus, a two hour bus to this city near the coast called Wando. And from Wando we would have to take a ferry about two hours close to the island that my grandmother lived in Soando, but Soando was too small that it didn't have a dock for a large ferry. So a boat, a little fishing boat would have to meet the ferry 45 minutes in the middle of the ocean.
Suzy Chase: What?
Hooni Kim: Yeah. We will have to transfer in the middle of the ocean with no bridges. So for me, being little, they're just carrying me and throwing me onto the small boat. And that was the scariest, scariest ... I still can't swim because of that because I was so scared. And it was a 45 minutes on a small, I call it a tong tong boat because that's the sound that the motor made and we'd go 45 minutes in while being very seasick and from there on to my grandmother's house will be a 30 minute walk. Three days.
Suzy Chase: Oh my goodness.
Hooni Kim: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: Would you describe this island? I want to do a whole podcast about this island.
Hooni Kim: This island had one phone, it had one market and that market had the phone line that didn't have numbers, digits. You call and then it connects you to an operator and you would verbally tell them the number that you wanted to call. But on that island nobody had phones. So basically it was a connection to sort of the outside islands or the cities or even so. That's the phone that my grandmother used to call me to England and through to New York. Electricity on the whole island would go off at 9:00 PM I think the island had three TVs when I first started and we would all go visit these houses to watch the TV. For me, we had a TV, I don't say it was a new new thing, but to most of the younger it was still a fascinating machine to to sort of see motion in a box.
Hooni Kim: My memory is just going to a friend's house or a relatives house and watching black and white TV until nine o'clock and then going home. Nobody bought food at the stores. You know you bought alcohol at the stores if you didn't have enough or making it home. All the food was grown in your backyard. They had a communal rice paddy that the whole village farmed together to share. The whole island got together in November and did Gimjang, which is a sort of mass kimchi making for the entire year. Wando or ... that's South West area of Korea is famous for seafood and also famous for seaweed, Kelp as well as gim all around our farmhouse had gim. I guess people would know that as Nori or laver, it'd be dry. And that's what we would have breakfast, lunch and dinner with kimchi for a meal.
Hooni Kim: Every time I go to Korea, every new restaurant I go to, every new brand of gim or nori that comes out, I try it because I want to find the closest thing that I remember. And nothing, nothing could come close or have come close to the Kim that I had on that island.
Suzy Chase: So, your father passed away when you were two.
Hooni Kim: Yes.
Suzy Chase: Did visiting your grandma on the island kind of make you feel connected with your dad?
Hooni Kim: You know, I was so young and I had never known my father, him passing away when I was two, before I could sort of remember anything. So I was fine with not having a father. I did get a sense that instead of me having a connection, my grandmother felt that connection with me a lot more. And it never changed. Every time I was there, I would never see her sleeping. When I went to sleep, she was holding my hand. When I woke up in the morning, I found her holding my hand. So I knew that half the time, maybe it wasn't me that she's thinking about, but it was my father that she had lost, she was thinking about.
Hooni Kim: So I hated going there. You can imagine living in the city and then go into a farm that smelled like pig dung everywhere. You know? I understood why I was there. I complained, but I still went because there was a time when I didn't actually go. I did go to Korea, but I didn't go to Soando island because my mom couldn't make it and I was too young to be able to go by myself and I felt really guilty the entire year. So after that, I made sure that I went.
Suzy Chase: Yeah. And it touched me because your dad was an only son and you were the only grandson of her only son.
Hooni Kim: I have an only child, so ...
Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh.
Hooni Kim: Yeah. Not by choice, but yeah, we have one son.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, same here. We had one, we tried for another, we didn't ... it's New York City, so ...
Hooni Kim: Yeah, it's New York city, we started late.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, same here.
Hooni Kim: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: So in the cookbook you have a recipe for dashi, which has been a mystery to me. Can you describe dashi and the process of making it?
Hooni Kim: Basically dashi comes from Kelp, which is a dried, thick seaweed. And in Korean it's called Tashima. In Japanese it's called Khombu and there's a lot of nutrients and there's a lot of natural glutamates. We're trying to make that MSG man made flavor in natural form. And that's why you want to keep the nutrients of this Kelp. You want to keep the glutamates or you want to keep the flavor and that's why we don't boil it.
Hooni Kim: We sort of heat it in hot water for a long time to sort of get all that flavor from that kelp. We also add shitake mushrooms and I like to add anchovies, dried anchovies. And what that acts is as a base, anytime the recipes call for water, I use dashi. Anytime it calls for, you know, like a French restaurant, Daniel ... I don't ever remember cooking with water. It was always veil stock, chicken stock, vegetable stock. Anytime we needed liquid it was one of those stocks because you never want to waste our efforts to sort of add more flavor to food. So that's sort of the same principle that I applied to Korean cooking and especially in my restaurant. And in this book, rarely use water. Water is used to make dashi.
Suzy Chase: The other day I made your recipe for kimchi and brisket fried rice on page 228. Can you describe this dish?
Hooni Kim: The star is the rice and of course in the kimchi fried rice, the kimchi is going to be the main flavor of the rice, but the flavor that comes out of brisket beef has a very sweet flavor because brisket is very fatty and people don't like brisket too much to sort of saute because it has a hard texture, but if you slice it really thin and you sort of cut it up and you get all that fatty beefiness into this fried rice, you get the sweetness and the fried rice that actually really helps the flavor of the kimchi because kimchi in itself is sort of acidic, sort of sour and to have a naturally sweet fat from the beef flavor the rice alone, it works. And we serve it at my other restaurant Hanjan, my second restaurant, this exact same way.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?
Hooni Kim: This cookbook, I have it. I study it like it's the Bible. I practice my Korean and my Chinese characters because there's just so much in this book about Korean cuisine that I still need to study to become a real Korean chef. It's called Dongui Bogam. A lot of Koreans, a lot of people don't even consider it a cookbook. It's the first medicine book ever written in Korea. But in Korea, medicine was practiced with food in the beginning. So this book is all about these Korean ingredients, how to prepare it and what it is used for as a doctor to improve one's health, to fix certain diseases. And to me, it's ... so what is important as a chef? I mean, yes, I cook good food, I cook delicious food like every other chef who's been cooking for 30 years. But to apply it to our health, that's I think another degree that we as chefs can sort of challenge ourselves on. And for me, I want to cook delicious food that is healthy.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, social media and where can we order food for delivery here in New York City?
Hooni Kim: I'm not going to point out my restaurant. I think there are so many Korean restaurants that just started Caviar delivery, DoorDash, Postmates, I don't know what these delivery things are called, but Jua is a small restaurant that just opened a month ago that they're struggling to sort of stay running because of this situation. I think you should order delivery from them. Atoboy they just started delivery. There are all of these small independent Korean restaurants that you should order delivery from. We should support these small restaurants as well as my restaurants, but you can find me at hoonikim.com it has all of my information on my restaurants, but also on Instagram where I'm the most active at @hoonikim and that's where I'm at.
Hooni Kim: I'm also delivering food to 30 families Monday through Friday every day because I feel like I'm the best delivery person in my staff and I'm the only one who has an SUV. We might be able to survive right now with these takeouts, but how's it going to be when we are able to open again? And people are uncomfortable going out as much as they used to. We don't know. And I think that's the toughest part. We're not in control and we don't know what's going to become of our industry. The best thing you guys can do is actually order the take out, the delivery food, and especially when this is all over, come and support us. Come dine at our restaurants and that will be amazing.
Suzy Chase: We can't wait.
Hooni Kim: Thank you so much.
Suzy Chase: So thank you for sharing your love of Korea with us all. And thanks for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.
Hooni Kim: Thank you so much for having me, Suzy.
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