I first met Sang Kim on December 18th, 2012, the day he opened Seoul Food Co. He sent out a tweet earlier in the day that said he’d be celebrating the opening by offering free vegetarian bibimbap to all that came by. Not one to pass up a free meal at a brand new restaurant, and working about a block away, I headed over for lunch. I arrived just as he finished giving the front door a final shine and with Windex bottle in hand, Sang opened the door and welcomed me, his very first customer, into his brand new restaurant.
Since then, I’ve visited Yakitori Bar, which shares the space with Seoul Food Co., on many occasions and had some very interesting conversations with Sang. He was one of the first people I talked to about the concept of this blog and he encouraged me to start it, and for that I will be forever thankful.
Sang Kim, part owner of Windup Bird Cafe in Toronto
Sang was supposed to be one of the first people I interviewed for this site but things just kept getting in the way and I was never able to make it over. I finally got the opportunity a few weeks ago when I was invited to the media launch of his brand new restaurant, Windup Bird Cafe. Sang, along with his partners Yumiko Kobayashi and Claudio Gaudio, plan to use the cafe as a spot that will, not only provide nourishment, but also host a variety of food programs for their local community.
At the age of fourteen, Sang was caught stealing so that he could help feed his younger brother and sister. Knowing that stealing wasn’t an option anymore Sang decided to get a job in the restaurant industry, “I got stuck in that line of work. In the 80s no one ever woke up and said “I want to get into the restaurant business” It’s changed now, but it wasn’t like that back then.” He continued in the business so that he could supplement his mother’s income and pay his way through school, and at nineteen he was given the opportunity to manage his first restaurant.
At the age of thirty two, Sang along with some partners opened up the very successful Japanese restaurant, Blowfish. Eventually, a high level of animosity between the partners set in, and Sang sold his shares in the business. “I made a very big mistake afterwards. I took the money I made from selling Blowfish and opened two restaurants at the same time with two different sets of partners, both of whom were expecting me to be the operator, so naturally they both failed.”
After those failures Sang’s life took a nasty turn. There was a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse and even thoughts of suicide. Fortunately for Sang, he was able to overcome his demons and he went on to operate other successful restaurants.
You’ve had, as you say, a few failures in your time. What are you doing differently at Wind Up Bird Cafe to prevent another failure?
Sang attributes part of the failures at his other places as being because of gender. “At the other places there was me, the Boss. It was command and control, a hierarchical structure with a very clear delineation of order, but it’s very different here. The work culture, the ambiance, it’s all driven by Yumiko. What’s also very interesting is that every person who works here, with the exception of myself, is a woman.
In the past my role has been the person coming up with these crazy ideas and expecting other people to make it work, and, if they didn’t work I’d freak out. Here, we have this wonderful team of women. and it’s the first time I’ve ended emails asking someone for their thoughts on my decisions. That change in me was because of the way Yumiko works, she works in a very consensual way. Is one a masculine way and the other a feminine way? I don’t know, but what I do know is that my kind of way doesn’t work and I’m smart enough to say let’s try another.”
What does food mean to you?
Food has meant different things to Sang during different periods in his life. For the first six years of his life, food meant abundance, family and love, but it didn’t stay that way. “We moved to Canada and for the next fifteen years of my life food meant hunger and insecurity. Food meant bad food. Food meant sickness.
What does it mean now? I’ve learned a lot from Yumiko, she takes a long time to develop a menu. Her process is very slow, but she has always believed that food is sacred. The preparation of food in a restaurant setting and the sale of food was sacred. The act of somebody ingesting your food is a sacred act, and I’m coming around to that idea of what food is. Food as sacrament is where I am now.
I’ve spent so much time in my life respecting food that it made a criminal out of me”. Sang admits that the story about him stopping stealing to work in a restaurant is untrue. In fact, he continued to steal. “Food was really scarce. Imagine a single mom in the ’80’s, in Jane and Finch, with 3 kids and not knowing English. It was a tough slog, especially the last 5 days of the month because my mom didn’t know how to stretch the welfare cheque. That’s what it was, I did what I had to do.”
Leah the Proteen Queen giving Kiki a cooking lesson
Why are children the focus of many of the programs at Windup Bird Cafe?
“I never wanted to have a child. For most of my life I loved children as an abstraction. I loved the idea of children, as long as I didn’t have to spend any time with them. But when I had my daughter my thinking changed. The most important thing that my daughter’s birth has taught me is that you cannot love abstractions. The programming here around children is my own personal journey of coming face to face with children as real things, real objects in the world, that demand of me that I love them. What I want to do with this place, in this community, is to make children feel like they’re loved for being the individuals that they are. That’s my journey, to me, suddenly children are not abstractions. I do a lot of work now with children, I didn’t before my daughter was born, I hated kids. Now I hate the abstraction of kids, I hate people who think kids are a mass of mindless brats who need to be fixed. I used to be one of those people, not any more.”
What are some of your earliest food related memories?
Sang was born in South Korea. His mom was the second of nine children and soon after his birth, his parents left him in the care of his grandmother as they went to Seoul to find work. He spent his early childhood years on his grandparents’ radish farm. His youngest aunt is only four years older than him, and she was the one he spent most of his time with. “My favorite memories were in the fall. We would sneak into this daikon radish farm and we’d pull these massive radishes out of the ground and my aunt would snap it, and I remember the sound of it cracking open. She would bite into it, then take a piece out of her mouth and feed me. I remember the taste, it was juicy, it had a hard texture, it was earthy and it left a little bit of a sting on my tongue but there was also a sweetness to it.”
What current food trend excites you?
“Korean. Korean is interesting because you have the big boys in the U.S. like David Chang and Roy Choi who has really put Korean food on the stage. The real reason why that trend excites me is still to this day, no one really knows what Korean food is. Depending on who you ask, Korean food is pork bone soup, BBQ or bibimbap. What’s really interesting is that there hasn’t been anything documented where people are able to tie all of these things tgether in accordance to the culinary history of Korea. It’s an incredibly variegated and diverse cuisine.
People will say Korean food has been trendy for a long time, but no, it hasn’t. When David Chang came out people were asking ‘Is that Korean food?’. Well, it is and it isn’t. Food is like that, food is like fashion. One day it’s dressed like this and the next is dressed like that. Does pork bulgogi tacos make sense? Of course it does. Is it part of the Korean culinary train, yes, it is. But can you contextualize it over it’s history, no, you can’t. You’ve got to tie all of that stuff together and nobody has done that yet, and that’s why I think the cultural trend is in Korean food in my mind.”
Continuing on with food trends, what are your thoughts of the current food truck trend in Toronto?
“Necessary in Toronto. I’ve signed petitions to get trucks on the street, to get better food stands out there and I’ve been asked by restauranteurs, why are you doing that? My answer to them is that brick and mortar places that don’t evolve will fail, that’s just a natural Darwinian process. It forces us to think more creatively and that’s what all great food cultures need to do, regardless of where it is, you have to evolve.”
Tell me about your writings?
Sang has authored two books thus far, and the third, ‘Woody Allen Ate My Kimchi’, will be released in the fall. “The first two were made into plays, as a matter of fact, one of the plays has been translated into four different languages. I receive most of my accolades from fiction, and it was because of fiction that I won the Gloria Vanderbilt Prize for Short Fiction last year. I’m a writer, but the only thing I don’t write is poetry, I find it very difficult. There aren’t many people who write good poetry and the ones who do it well are very rare.
For the third book, I want to give it one final scrub and then find the right publisher. The book is a memoir about my journey through food from the abundance in Korea, to the scarcity of it when we immigrated to Canada. It’s about my accidental life in the restaurant business, to coming to a place where I think of food as a sacrament. It also includes all these funny, anecdotal stories from behind the scenes of some of Toronto’s best known restaurants. The title, ‘Woody Allen Ate My Kimchi’, came from one of the stories in which I was courting Woody Allen when he was here for TIFF and I wanted him to come to my restaurant and try my mom’s kimchi. You’ll have to read the book to find out if he did eat my kimchi.”
What does the future hold for Sang Kim?
“I want to find ways to be more present. I want to get to a place where I don’t have to say any more cliches like ‘Time flies by’. I want to get to a place where I don’t answer somebody who asks ‘How are you?’ with ‘I’m busy.’ I don’t want to be that person. I want to develop better tools to be more simply in the moment. That’s it.”
Note: I want to thank Sang for taking the time to chat with me, it has been a long time coming.
The following pictures were taken at the media launch of Windup Bird Cafe that was held a few weeks ago. At that event, Sang explained his ‘Kid-chen Confidential‘ program where cooks eighteen years and under will teach other children how to cook healthy food.
Sang’s other series is one called ‘Cook Slash Book‘ where he will interview writers while they prepare the writer’s favorite dish. Windup Bird Cafe will then create a three course meal around the dish. On the night of the event, Sang interviewed author Joyce Wayne, author of “The Cook’s Temptation”, and together they prepared her mango cheesecake
