Photo by Terry Brennan
What’s Up
In November, one of the Twin Cities’ most exciting chefs opened probably her most anticipated restaurant, one that could be seen as a culinary coming-of-age memoir.
The neighborhood: Uptown, Minneapolis, where chef Ann Kim lived upon moving back to Minnesota from New York City, ditching her acting career and opening one beloved pizza spot, then two more. The cuisine: Korean American—or, specifically, the food she grew up eating. The execution: the most nerve-racking of the James Beard Award-winning chef’s career, amounting to a pivot away from a pandemic-era tortilla experiment (Sooki & Mimi, all about the masa) and toward a concept so autobiographical that it confronts childhood trauma.
“It was a cuisine that wasn’t accepted or understood, and so I tried to hide from it,” she recalls. “It took me 13 years to get to this point where I felt like I had the confidence to present this in a way that felt right to me.”
Photo by Terry Brennan
Side Dish
Kim’s goal with Sooki & Mimi, which closed last summer after two and a half years, had been something casual and lively. With pandemic restrictions, she says, the vision became formal: a tasting-menu destination that went prix fixe due to financial constraints. “I think a lot of people thought we were a fancy Mexican restaurant, which was not the intention.” So, she did something “really drastic and bold and maybe even a little crazy or fearless” by opening Kim’s instead, in the same location.
It wasn’t just a business decision; the project mines her past, dish by dish. “Korean mothers do not pass down recipes,” she says. Instead, there’s a Korean term, son-mat. “‘Son’ means ‘hand,’ and ‘mat’ means ‘taste,’ and it just means that a good cook relies on their palate.” When Kim wanted to put kimchi on pizza at Pizzeria Lola, she says she spent a lot of time preparing it with her mom, logging the steps and quantities. “We did the same process with the bindaetteok” on the Kim’s menu, she says. These crunchy mung-bean pancakes are deeply flavorful yet perfectly comforting. Her Ham ’N’ Cheese “sammie” has Big Mac addictiveness. A heated stone bowl crisps the bibimbap’s bottommost rice. And the banchan, which are small, seasonal side dishes, blend tradition and inspiration: Her mom’s kimchi methods sit alongside some of Sooki & Mimi’s salsa macha mixed into mustard greens.
Photo by Terry Brennan
Where It’s At
The digs here are the same as Sooki & Mimi, with Mexican-inspired decor swapped for Korean-inspired. The basement bar has been rebranded as the Bronto Bar. And the location, at large, contributes to the overall value of Kim’s. “I wasn’t sure how people here in Minnesota would receive it,” Kim says. “You know, my wheelhouse was pizza. We don’t have large Korean communities like New York, or L.A., or Chicago, or even a lot of the Southern cities.”
But, just over a month into opening, she says she hears a lot of gratitude. “When people stop me, I almost see them get emotional, saying, ‘Thank you for being in Uptown, thank you for believing in this neighborhood, thank you for bringing in this food that we haven’t had an opportunity to have access to.’ And I generally feel it comes from a real place. They’ve eaten the food and they’ve tasted my son-mat, my mother’s son-mat, and my grandmother’s son-mat.”
1423 W. 31st St., Minneapolis, kimsmpls.com
