Jennifer Kim’s mom keeps a bottle under her kitchen sink containing knobby, gnarly roots and a continually replenished volume of clear, high-proof spirit.
“I’m extremely upset,” she says. “We’re taking time to mourn and grieve but we’re also taking time to celebrate because there’s been this great untethering.” Kim is a onetime pharmacy student who switched tracks and came up in the kitchens of a handful of One Off Hospitality restaurants—Nico Osteria, Avec, Blackbird—before making her name at the short-lived cured seafood-focused microdeli Snaggletooth.
“I was really focusing on, ‘what is fermentation to Korean culture?’ A lot of that was done in large family gatherings or even a couple people that lived around each other who were like, ‘We’re going to come together and make big batches and split it between everyone in the neighborhood.’ I just really love that about Korean cuisine, but in the midst of a pandemic, small gatherings are not encouraged. That part of my life is missing right now, but I could still pay homage.”
At the same time she’s also starting to think in terms of scale, with cases of tomatoes, peppers, and summer squash to process, jar, and hand label. She has her signature Mama Kim’s red cabbage in the works, and once napa cabbage fully comes into season she’ll get to work on classic baechu kimchi. Once the dust settles after the restaurant closes, she’ll address how she’ll introduce these things to the “alternative economy” so many restaurant workers have pivoted to. These things will likely be offered via Instagram (@jennifer.skim), but she hints that a number of Korean banchan are being reserved for a pop-up in the next few weeks, modeled after pojangmacha, South Korea’s ubiquitous outdoor street food tents. She still needs to pay her rent, after all.
