105: Weaving Ancient Korean Cookbooks with Local and Seasonal Food with Ji Hye Kim

When we think about “authentic” food experiences – what are we really explicitly looking for? Oftentimes the idea of authenticity can be exoticized to represent a particular type of ethnic cuisine at a specific time – or someone’s version of it. But in a diasporic world, there are ways to create a menu and recipes that reflect both local and seasonal food availability in a way that continues to weave food stories from the past into present life.

My guest this week is someone who is exceptionally good at blending the past and present into her dining experiences, Chef Ji Hye Kim.  She is the chef and managing partner of MISS KIM in Ann Arbor, MI. Ji Hye is inspired by her ancestors and their stories told through ancient Korean cookbooks, as well as her farmer neighbors in Michigan. Miss Kim’s food is simple and good, with the menu dictated by seasonality and locality following Korean culinary traditions.

Ji Hye grew up in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the States at the age of 13. After graduating from the University of Michigan and a successful career in hospital administration, Ji Hye switched to the hospitality industry in 2008. Having trained at various Zingerman’s businesses and Rome Sustainable Food Project, she ran an Asian street food cart before opening a brick and mortar location in 2016. As well as providing convivial service and delicious food, Miss Kim has been committed to doing away with tipped credit and paying a fair wage to all staff since opening.

Ji Hye is a semifinalist for the James Beard Award Best Chef Great Lakes in 2020. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and as independent restaurants across the country are at risk, she was admitted to and participated in the James Beard Chef Boot Camp for Policy Change and Food Lab Detroit’s Fellowship for Change in Food and Labor. Recently Ji Hye was chosen as one of Best New Chefs 2021 by Food & Wine. She believes that service is an honorable profession and envisions a more delectable, sustainable, and equitable future for the industry.

She’s on the show today to talk about her experiences entering the culinary world at a “later” age (it’s really not that late), and how she’s making space in her restaurants for new ways to think about food, community, and seasonality.

Learn More about Ji Hye Kim: 

103: How Food Styling Creates Stories with Alyssa Noui of Supping Good

Whenever I watch a baking show, or a movie that has a really delicious looking food scene, I’m always blown away by the type of story that you can tell just through video and images of food. What exactly does it take to create these visions of food looking so delectable, despite there being no sense of smell associated with them? And what happens when the cameras stop rolling and the food is no longer needed?

Editorial food styling by Alyssa Noui, from alyssanoui.com

My guest this week, Alyssa Noui, is an LA based food stylist and culinary producer that is sharing her experiences to answer these questions. Alyssa grew up in a multi-cultural family near San Francisco in California, and was exposed to all sorts of dining experiences and cuisines in her youth. When she moved to Los Angeles, she worked on sets of culinary departments and found that the production in food provided the pace, organization, creativity, and camaraderie that she desired in food work. Alyssa started her own company, Supping Good, and working across live television segments, commercials, and feature films using her culinary skills to meet client expectations and stay on top of the latest trends to achieve the appetizing moments for the camera that we all love to watch.

She really believes in a sense of place and story that can be communicated with a meal and a well-dressed table, and shares today how she works to create that type of magic!

Learn More About Alyssa:

102: Season 8 Launch! [Solo Episode]

Welcome to Season 8!

It has been far too long and I am really excited to be back behind the old mic bringing you all new interviews this season. I am so grateful for the conversations that I’ve had so far for this season, and have some more planned that I am really looking forward to sharing with you.

True to any season launch for AnthroDish, I’m going to give you a breakdown of all the reasons why the season ended so abruptly at the end of March 2022 (and how it almost always happens that seasons end abruptly in the spring and launch in the fall).

Check out the solo episode to hear some more personal updates, and then brace yourself for all the amazing conversations that have been happening behind the computer scenes for the last many months! New episodes each Tuesday

101: Upcycling Imperfect Produce into Healthy Eats with Monique Chan of Bruized

We started off this season looking at just how much Canadians wasted food, and how food systems management can be used to tackle this from a research based perspective. But the realities of how to navigate food waste, and the chain from supplier to consumer get a bit more murky. So how can it be done?

This week, I’m chatting with Monique Chan, who is working on a solution through her company, Bruized. Monique is a 26-year old creative from Toronto, Ontario. She founded Bruized in 2019 as a way to combat the food waste crisis through upcycling commonly discarded ingredients like juice pulp, imperfect produce, and more into tasty, plant based snacks. At Bruized, the mission is to create feel good food for the planet and people. Well finding renewed purpose for the ingredients they rescue, Monique and her team see the potential where others see waste, and want to help break the stigma around wasted food. By embracing the imperfections of the foods we eat and within ourselves, she sees it as a way of working towards a more sustainable future.

Monique today discusses how she started Bruized, some of the major challenges of working within food waste, and creative ways to start thinking about using your own food waste in scraps. She also highlights some of the lessons that we can learn about ourselves through thinking about food waste, which I found so fascinating.

Learn More About Monique:

100: Sarah in the Hot Seat with Guest Host Sydney Gautreau

I'm someone who normally doesn't stop to take a breath and appreciate everything I've done, but I wanted to take a moment this week to celebrate AnthroDish hitting 100 EPISODES!

I'm so excited that we've made it this far together, I can't thank you all enough for tuning in over the years, bringing in your expertise and your questions to make this journey even more dynamic than I could have possibly imagined when I first started it. 

To properly celebrate this, my friend Sydney Gautreau is interviewing me this week! We've been toying with this idea for a while, so when she proposed it as the way to celebrate 100 AnthroDishes, I couldn't say no. Even if I am the worst interview guest - I am normally the type of person to quickly turn questions back on interviewers because of my hosting tendencies. Yet the perks of having a friend interview is that she knows the types of questions to ask me where I feel genuiney encouraged to answer it in more vulnerable and real ways. 

So today, Sydney asks me to share more about my own experiences than I normally do. Which is scary, but also exciting. So here we go! 

PS, Sydney is a fabulous editor and writing coach outside of her hosting abilities - please check out her website if you are in need of some powerful editing and coaching that makes you feel more aligned with your own writing:

Sydney's Editing and Writing Coach Website: https://sydneygautreau.com/