Breaking the Restaurant Mold: Ji-Hye Kim’s Mission to Transform Workplace Culture

How can restaurant leaders innovate traditional cuisine while honoring its roots? 

Ji-Hye Kim shares her journey from corporate healthcare to founding Miss Kim, drawing on both her Korean heritage and Michigan ingredients to create a unique dining experience. 

The conversation explores how her business background enabled her to implement innovative employee compensation models while building a successful restaurant.

Key people who shaped Ji-Hye’s journey:

  • Her mother – Whose home cooking inspired her connection to Korean cuisine
  • Park Kwanghee – Korean kimchi master and mentor
  • Paul and Ari (Zingerman’s founders) – Provided business framework and support
  • Staff members who stepped up during personal challenges
  • Local Michigan farmers who supply ingredients

 

Don’t miss this powerful conversation with a restaurateur who combines analytical business thinking with culinary passion while creating equitable workplace practices.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE

Transcript

0:04

Welcome to another edition of Inspired Stories, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes, how they’ve overcome adversity, and explore current challenges they’re facing.
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity.

0:26

My name is Anthony Cotespotti and today’s guest is Jihe Kim, who is the managing Partner and Chef at Miss Kim, a Korean restaurant that’s part of the Zingerman’s community of businesses in in Ann Arbor, MI.
Miss Kim is dedicated to bringing traditional Korean flavors to the community, using seasonal, local ingredients and time honored cooking techniques to create delicious and unique dishes.

0:53

Under Jihei’s leadership, Miss Kim has gained recognition for its outstanding contributions to the culinary seeing, offering a fresh perspective on Korean Korean cuisine.
Tell you what, we’re going to start over.
I got a little tongue tied twice in there.

1:09

That’s all right.
Go ahead.
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity.

1:26

My name is Anthony Cotespotti and today’s guest is Jihei Kim, who is the Managing Partner and Chef at Miss Kim, a Korean restaurant that’s part of the Zingerman’s community of businesses in Ann Arbor, MI.
Miss Kim is dedicated to bringing traditional Korean flavors to the community, using seasonal local ingredients and time honored cooking techniques to create delicious and unique dishes.

1:51

Under her leadership, Miss Kim has gained recognition for its outstanding contributions to the culinary scene, offering a fresh perspective on Korean cuisine.
Jihe herself has been celebrated for her innovative approach and commitment to excellence in the kitchen, and before becoming a chef, she earned her BA in Economics and Political Science.

2:14

She has experience in operational management within healthcare and food services, including serving as Executive Director at D&H Billing Company.
Her diverse background has enabled her to bring a unique blend of business acumen and culinary passion to her role at Miss Kim.

2:32

And we’ll also get to talk about her new location that she’s about to open.
Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line.

2:50

One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year and extra cash flow by implementing one of our proprietary programs.
Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.
To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at AD back benefitsagency.com.

3:07

All right now, back to our guest today, the Chef and Managing Partner at Miss Kim Gee.
Hey Kim, I appreciate you making the time to Share your story today.
Anthony, thank you for having me.
So, Jay, tell us a little bit about your experiences before Zingerman’s and Miss Kim’s.

3:23

You had a bit of a different background than food.
Service.
Yeah, yeah, after I graduated from University of Michigan I mean, I, I studied political science and economics.
I didn’t study like a culinary degree.
I went back to my home state, New Jersey, and I was basically accounts manager to start.

3:43

So I worked a lot on accounts receivable and eventually I headed a accounts receivable company for hospitals.
And there I was able to do not just receivables, but like payables and set policy and and you know, decide on benefit package.

4:01

I sat in the board meetings for like the owner performance reviews.
It was a multifaceted.
So how did you get from that type of work to food?
What’s the bridge there there?

4:18

Those aren’t, in most people’s minds, closely related.
There, there’s no bridge.
There’s.
No, you just took a jump.
Yeah, there’s.
No bridge there upset.
But I mean like one thing I can say is that I did that work for five years and I was doing well.
Like to be in mid 20s and with only bachelor’s degree and I started making six figures.

4:38

So that was really fantastic.
And what I liked about it was that you get to do a little bit of everything, like you have to delegate and maintain many different things because it was a smaller startup company.
What I didn’t like was the industry, like I didn’t want to be in a healthcare or insurance industry.

4:57

And and I also had self realization that I love working.
So I was working at the time.
I was also young, I was working at the time like 75 hours week on salary and I didn’t feel tired at all and enjoyed it very much.

5:15

And then and then I read this article.
I, I don’t even remember who wrote it.
That like a happiness of a person really depends on who you work with because that’s who you spend most time with.
You spend more time with your Co workers than your family members that you may not see very often or you may see just for dinner.

5:38

And that kind of struck a note.
And then I started thinking like, I went into that industry because I graduated right after 911 and at the time I, I didn’t have a, a, a citizenship.

5:54

So it was extremely difficult to find a job.
So I basically got a job that was there that that was open and and then did really well there.
So once I was able to make some money and take a breather and gain some work experience, I asked myself like, what did like I, I feel like I’ve spent the entire entirety of my life up until that point doing stuff that was asked of me.

6:21

The question was like what do I have to do?
What do I have to do to graduate high school?
What do I have to do to keep my student visa?
And what do I what major do I have to get to get the job the easiest which will lead to green card etcetera.

6:40

And I finally had room to breathe and finally asked myself what is it that I want to do?
Like what is like if I’m spending majority of my life at work, then is this industry worthy of my time and effort?

6:57

So that’s when I started thinking like I didn’t want to be in this industry.
And then I arrived at food because around that time I got married and I moved back to Michigan because my ex-husband was at University of Michigan.
So once I moved there, you know, I, I was like, maybe I want to do something that’s more tactile and hands on because the insurance work, it’s not like I talk to patients all the time.

7:29

So it seemed like very paper heavy and once removed and then at the same time, I missed my mother’s cooking a lot because she cooks everything from scratch.
Even then after 14 hour days and she’s an amazing cook.
And I had all my life taken for Korean food for granted.

7:47

And I started missing home cooked food and Korean food a lot.
And so then I decided to go work for Zimmerman’s community of businesses because it’s, they have great food.
And then I also thought that they had create management and leadership programs and, and principles.

8:07

So I figured food wasn’t supposed to be like the final destination.
It was something that I was going to do for like 2 to three years and see if I like it.
If I didn’t like it, I would have still had like a kind of a crash course on how to run a small business, and I thought those skills were transportable.

8:29

So that’s how I ended up at Zingerman’s community of businesses.
Did you have Did you spend a lot of time with your mother in Korea making her traditional food?
Were you already familiar with how to crank out these recipes?

8:44

Or did you spend a lot of time on the phone with her trying to get her help?
Nope.
So my mom, so she’s a first born who’s married into first born.
So that means that all the holiday cooking falls on her plate.
And she felt very strongly that I do not learn how to cook because in her traditional mind, I’m going to have to learn how to cook once I become a wife and a mother anyway.

9:10

So she’s like, oh, you don’t have to learn to cook now as a girl.
Like go enjoy your childhood.
And then once you get married, then then you know, you’ll have to learn.
She didn’t know that time has changed and I’m going to need to learn how to cook for different reasons.

9:27

So she never really taught me.
But I grew up eating homemade food and I grew up watching how to cook.
So when I started cooking, I noticed that I was picking up Korean food recipes really fast.
And I was, in comparison, struggling with, for example, like Italian recipes.

9:45

I had to do it like multiple times more than if I had to do it Korean cuisine.
So something rubbed off, but she didn’t teach me.
OK, So what exactly is Zingerman’s?
Zingerman’s you know the the proper long name is Zingerman’s community of businesses and that should tell you some idea.

10:04

It’s multiple different businesses.
We’re only located in Washtenaw County because we’re very dedicated to our local community and it’s a food related businesses in Washtenaw County.
That’s like, you know, individually owned and we are only coming together because we decided to work together as a community and under the same mission and guiding principles in how we run our businesses.

10:35

So the structure is not quite franchised because we don’t duplicate like Cinnamon’s Delicatessen is the first one that started and it’s like immensely popular.
But there’s no second telly.
There is a coffee company, there is bakery, there is a sit down American restaurant that does quite a bit of BBQ food.

10:53

And there’s me that do Korean food.
And there is a business consulting company and the wedding, wedding, wedding catering business in a wedding hall.
And there’s there’s like Creamery and mail order.

11:08

There’s a lot of different businesses, but there’s no two of the same kind and we just work together.
And so when you say you work together, it’s it’s sort of like a marketing Co-op, like you sort of put shared dollars into a pool to kind of help promote the larger collective.

11:24

Close.
So our, so Zingerman’s was founded by Paul Saginaw and Ari Weizenbach and those two founding partners have a stake in every single business.
But I for example do not have any stake in any other business and they’re the founding partners and they’re investing partners and they hold the intellectual property and the branding and I am the managing partner.

11:48

I am the one doing the day-to-day operation of my business.
We’re tied that way.
And then another way that we’re tied is that we have a thing called service network where they handle HR and IT and accounting and and creative services.

12:05

So a lot of illustrations and branding work and those services are shared maximize like it would be impossible.
Well, it would have been very expensive for me as a starting small restaurant to have all those services.
But because it’s shared, then I get to have a good HR support.

12:23

I get to have a accountant that’s looking at my numbers every month so I don’t have to cut corners that small businesses often have to because the cost of those things add up and become prohibitively expensive.
So there’s economies of scale, obviously.

12:39

Then when everybody can kind of share the same HR team or the same legal support, you get access to better resources than you would be able to on your own.
Sounds like a pretty, pretty smart model.
And so you decided that you’re going to start a restaurant.

12:57

What was the first day like opening up your doors?
It’s not like we put up a sign and then did a grand opening.
We did a soft opening and I remember the first dinner and it was, it was challenging because instead of having people stagger in, we had a party of 20 join us.

13:19

So I would say it was definitely a learning experience.
And then since then, like we invited people to come and help us practice food and service for about 3 weeks before we opened to public.
And then once we opened to public, we haven’t taken a breather.

13:37

We just kept going and we’ve learned a lot through the years.
What’s?
One of your biggest lessons?
My biggest lesson I think is really about sales, like it’s about top line sales because we had a lot of challenges with labor cost.

13:55

We had challenges with food cost.
And when you have labor costs at like at one point our labor cost was 70%.
There was only one week, but it was a shockingly high number, especially considering independent restaurants have a razor thin margins, like maybe 5% is considered success.

14:14

So when your profit margin is 5% or less, but your labor cost is 70%, it’s really easy to focus on labor cost, but it’s all percentage.
So I made a active choice to leave the labor like I mean we like we kind of tightened it, but not just focus on labor costs, we really focused on increasing sales because if the pie gets bigger then labor costs will get smaller percentage wise.

14:43

And that was I think the biggest learning that I’ve had to like look at the P&L every month and decide strategically where you’re going to focus and then keep focusing on it until you see a turn around.
What were some of the most impactful things that you did early on to boost sales so that you could help bring down that percentage of Labor cost?

15:08

This is this is a decision that I made, you know, as we opened and it became the biggest problem for first three years and then it became the biggest money saver these days.
So I think that’s a interesting one.

15:27

So in most American restaurants other than seven states that do not do tip credit the servers.
So the restaurant is the people who you see in the dining room, they’re called front of the house.

15:43

And then people who are in the kitchen are called back of the house and front of the house.
And the back of the house, even though they work under the same restaurant or same company, are paid very differently.
So the cooks are paid like, you know, regular hourly.
Most of the times maybe a management will be paid salary.

16:01

Very rarely they have benefits.
The front of the house also do not have benefits, but they’re on something called tip credit.
So these are sub minimum wages for hourly wages their base pay.
So minimum wage may be like $11.00 an hour or $12.00 an hour, but they’re paid like consistently 2 and 3 dollars and change in most states.

16:23

And the majority of their income gets supplemented by tips.
That’s coming from the tables that they take care of.
And this poses a couple different problems.
I think there is a lot of like theories written about why this is really bad and what history, how it came about.

16:40

But I’m not going to go into that.
I’m just going to talk about my current business practices.
The problem that I’ve seen, because I’ve been a server and I’ve been a cook, is the disparity between front of the house and the back of the house, even though they’re supposed to play as one team.
So take a Friday night where it’s extremely busy and servers can walk away with 200 dollars $300.00 in tips, whereas cooks make the same hourly wage whether they had to work really hard or whether they had to chill out.

17:12

They can chill out on a snowy day, but like a snowy Monday lunch, the servers can make barely a minimum wage, if not even less, and the cooks will make the same wage.
This creates like, an environment that’s not very conducive to teamwork.

17:30

Yeah.
And then it keeps the cooks separated from the guests that they’re serving.
So it sort of creates a environment for apathy for people who have like, dietary restrictions, for example.
Like, it’s vital for the service to make sure the diet dietary restrictions are assured and communicated, right.

17:50

But the cooks are once removed, and it doesn’t impact their income directly.
So they may be, they may do the work, but they may roll their eyes or they may complain about it because it makes their job harder and they’re not getting paid any more money.
So in the beginning of from the beginning of the restaurant opening, I decided that we’re not going to do that.

18:09

We’re going to put the front of the house and the back of the house in the exact same pay scale because they’re supposed to work as a team.
And I wanted to do away with the inequity and the pay system.
So then we decided to pay way above minimum wage as base pay for both front of the house and the back of the house.

18:28

And then when we first started, we didn’t take tips at all.
So we, we decided the starting wage will be the same as living wage for the county that we’re in.
And at the time, I think it was about $14.00 an hour.
And that’s, it’s definitely more than $2.00 and change.

18:50

So that’s what created super high labor cost for us.
Because if you have, if you take tip credit, what you’re actually essentially doing is transferring labor cost as a burden to your staff and the customers who tip them.

19:06

So we were like, OK, let’s share a burden.
So, so we saw first, first year we saw labor cost go up to 70% because sales were not building fast enough to cover for the labor cost.
So that was kind of challenging to say the least.

19:22

And and then we had like another problem.
The guest kept wanting to tip even though we were not taking tips.
And then at the same time they were complaining about the prices even though at the end of the final check after the tips that are added like we would have been comparable with other restaurants on Main Street.

19:40

So, but menu prices are, it looks inflated because it has labor costs already included in it instead of like having labor costs taken out and then it gets added as a tip at the end.
So we struggled mightily for the first three years with this.

19:56

I believed in this system.
I believe that eventually it’s going to be profitable.
It’s going to add to profit of the restaurant.
I believe that it was the better way to go as an industry as a whole and and more sustainable.
I thought that it would be a better retention.

20:13

And I also thought that when you do something that’s so like going against the stream of where everybody’s going, I thought I needed to give it at least two years instead of that’s a long time.
That’s a long time when?
That’s a long time when you’re seeing, you know, your labor costs are sky high as a percentage and you’re struggling to to build the customer base to get the sales up to where they need to be.

20:38

Two years is a long time.
To, to stick to your guns, we sort of like crunched the numbers and we crunched the numbers a different way than how profit and loss statement is done.
So profit and loss statements often like sales cost of goods sold and operational cost.

20:54

And then like, you know, profit, we did it in a different way.
We saw what’s the minimum cost that we have to incur to run the restaurant, not just the operational cost like rent, you pay the rent anyway, but we cannot not have any staff in there.
So what’s the minimum number of staff that we have to get in there?

21:12

When we crunched the numbers, what we saw was that the high menu cost was actually keeping the sales higher than it would have been.
And what we need is really like industry term, it’s butts in the seats.
So what we really needed was butts in the seat.

21:30

That’s very technical.
You’re gonna very technical.
Yeah, very technical.
Hospitality linguist like we needed more butts in the seats.
Labor cost looks like a problem right now because the sales are low.
So.
OK, so then I decided, OK, for two years, I’m gonna give it two years.

21:49

I’m gonna really focus on sales.
And then and then another thing that we did was we modified how we paid this.
So we heard our guests concerned that they would like to leave tips.

22:04

So we decreased the menu prices just a tiny bit and then we allowed the the guests to leave tips.
And that was sort of a game changer because that added income, extra income on top of the base pay for our staff.

22:23

And, and then I can see the staff feeling like better about their wage.
And, and I’m not talking about one particular step like staff through the years, as the members of the staff change, we started getting better and better candidates and people stayed longer and longer.

22:42

And I think that helped quite a bit with keeping the food quality and service quality high.
And, and then, and then what happened was that the pandemic hit like before the pandemic, we were doing a lot of things to increase the sales.

23:00

So we did like a, we did like a news, marketing and social media.
Those are basic.
And then we started doing like a monthly guest shift dinners where were monthly cycling pick dinners where food cost was very low and labor cost was low for that party that dinner.

23:17

But the sales, sales was much higher.
So we had better margins for those.
So we started doing more of those.
We started adjusting our hours.
So we opened a little later and then closed a little earlier to save labor that way.
But we didn’t really cut people’s hours and we definitely didn’t cut the dollar amount of the base pay.

23:37

And then when the pandemic hit, that’s when I started seeing the system really pay off.
Sales were going up to a point that by 2019, I think we were, we were on a good projection to start breaking even and do better.

23:56

And we had a sister restaurant who was in a tip credit system and they also took for about four years to break even.
So we were on par with our sister restaurant on a different tip scale.
But then when the pandemic hit, what happened was, you know, restaurants were the only businesses they were allowed to open for a while.

24:18

All the other business stores were shut down and we started getting a lot of to go orders, but we didn’t have anybody in the dining room.
And what other restaurants had to do often is lay off the entire server staff.
But what we did was we cross trained our server staff to be our cooks.

24:41

Yeah, so like some of the staff decided not to continue working, some had pre-existing conditions, some were students that are going back home, so that was fine.
And then couple staff wouldn’t want to train in the kitchen.
We were able to send them to Zingerman’s mail order because mail order businesses were suddenly very, very busy because people are just ordering everything online.

25:04

And we moved servers to be cooks because it was an easy transfer.
There was just a change of job description and title because the pay was on the same level.
So nobody had to go into like a complete different pay system to have a different job title.

25:20

So we were able to transfer access front of the house staff to short staffed back of the house.
And if I looked at other industry trends at the time, cooks they were, we were like the industry wide restaurants were always short staffed with cooks and had a lot of servers over like laid off.

25:42

And it was also helpful that we had a higher base pay because that means that they qualify for unemployment.
If you’re a server and you are at $2.00 and change and you’re tempted to underreport your tips and you have been, then when time to get unemployment, you made so little money that you didn’t really get a lot of unemployment at all.

26:05

So that helped quite a bit to have a stable staff who are being saved and then got transferred and really wanted to be working.
And from then on, as we got busy and as the dining rooms reopened, what happened was that shortage of the crooks have gotten to a point that we started increasing the hourly wage for the cooks, like go higher and higher and higher.

26:32

So at least in our town, maybe like $13.00 an hour, $14.00 an hour was the norm for like cooks with not a lot of experience.
Now they were getting like 17, eighteen, $19.00 an hour.

26:49

But our cooks, because their base pay is they’re, they’re getting paid in base pay and share tips, they were already at $22.00 an hour.
Wow.
So they were one of the highest paid cooks and dishwashers in our town, which means that we attracted more stable qualified candidates.

27:09

And once they joined, they also got health insurance because we have full benefit package through Zinami’s community of businesses.
So that also helped.
So generally, we had a better total package being offered and health care insurance.

27:26

Health insurance suddenly took on more importance for young people with the pandemic.
Yeah.
So what so?
At what point in all of this GA did you think, OK, this is working?
Like we’ve got something here, this is sustainable, we’re going to be profitable, we’re going to make it.

27:45

Systematically, operationally, 2020, financially 2021, yeah, We came out of the pandemic really having well adjusted and pandemic for us, while it was challenging, it was an opportunity.

28:03

And financially, we started seeing things turn around in 2021 and we’ve been profitable and more profitable than industry average since then and still being able to pay people more and provide the full benefit package, paid time off, all of that.

28:24

So we’ve got a picture of sort of this arc of your plan and that that ultimately has worked out really well to take care of the employees in a different compensation structure and it’s worked really well.
I want to talk about the new location that you’re working on, but before we get there, I want to paint a picture for folks who haven’t been to Miss Kim.

28:49

What what is the experience like?
What is describe the cuisine, describe the the the setting, the ambience kind of paint a picture for.
Us sure.
The location that we’re in is Kerrytown marketing shop.
So it’s like a cute little neighborhood, a mall like a shop where there’s a bunch of little independently owned shop.

29:09

There are a couple restaurants and everything is walkable.
We’re a block away from farmers market.
Farmers market opens every Wednesday and Wednesdays and Saturdays.
And before that it was always a French Bistro to like kind of give you an idea of what the inside looks like.

29:27

Exposed brick walls, clean lines.
But I, I think when you walk in, I think what you would notice is that the staff generally look not super stressed and they’re welcoming and some of our staff are inexperienced.

29:43

But I can say this about all of our staff.
They really want to make sure that you have a warm, nice dining experience and when you sit down because our cuisine is not a straightforward Korean food that people may have experienced, especially in a smaller town like Ann Arbor.

30:03

You may have questions about the cuisine because our food is equally inspired by my Korean ancestors.
I look at the story and history of the cuisine and the dishes, as well as what we can get from Michigan farmers and producers.

30:20

Because like any traditional cuisine, Korean food dictates that you use things that are in season and locally available.
And being outside of Korea and being located in Midwest America, that’s going to have some impact on how Korean food looks like in Michigan, right.

30:40

So we we like to say it’s like a Michigan Korean food and.
Yeah.
And and you know, any questions you may have, servers will be able to answer for you.
We our, our sort of principle is that they’re here as our guest and it’s our responsibility to make sure that they have a good time.

31:04

And then they have delicious food.
If they have bunch of allergies, as long as they communicate what those are, it’s our job to make sure that we produce something beautiful and delicious.
So you’ll find very smiley, kind, accommodating staff and hopefully the food is also full flavored and fresh.

31:26

And then you walk away feeling like you had a wonderful time.
So I hear what you’re saying about you’re not going to be able to get all the same ingredients in the Midwest, the USA that you would in Korea.
What?
Give me an example, maybe one or two kind of if you call them substitutions, but changes that you had to make sure.

31:49

We use beets and broccolini a lot and those are not made of the Korea and they use it now, but it’s still fairly new vegetables.
These are not good like broccoli, broccolini, cauliflower, beets.

32:04

These are not vegetables that I saw growing up in Korea in the 80s and 90s.
We, we make ample use of that because Michigan produces a lot.
And these are, these are, these are more available because the winters in Michigan’s longer like the fall season, fall, winter going into spring, it’s almost half a year.

32:25

Whereas Korea every season is like exactly 3 months.
So we may have like, broccolini tossed in fish sauce and chili flakes and garlic.
That might have been a cabbage dish or chive dish in Korea.

32:44

So we’re taking the dish and the flavors and then just using different vegetables from Michigan we use.
Let me see what else.
But we do try to use like non-GMO tofu.

33:00

We try to use we have a rotating special.
So during the summer our salad selection goes from one salad to like 4 salad.
And we use a lot of local corn.
The corn in Korea tradition like like heirloom corn or like a very traditional Korean corn is sticky and less sweet.

33:23

But in Midwest it’s sweet yellow corn.
So that’s what we use for sweet yellow corn.
But it gets tossed in fermented soy paste and and we add a little bit of butter to it and then it gets locally grown microgreens.
It may have been scallions in Korea we use wasabi greens or or pea shoots.

33:43

So in my mind, we’re not taking that much that many liberties.
But if you look at it you it would definitely look different than like your mom and pop Korean restaurant in a college town.

34:00

Somebody who’s a hardcore purist of you know what Korean food is and should be will notice some slight differences, but the way that you’re describing it sounds like these would be fun and interesting nuances to experiment.

34:15

With yeah, I sure hope so.
I mean like, and then there are different ways of serving like Korean table, traditionally it’s full of kimchi and side dishes and Pickles and you get all of that free in America.
But like Korean food in, in Korea, you get very cheap food to very high end food and there’s all Korean food and sometimes you get one side dish in Pickles or sometimes you get 12 side dishes or sometimes you don’t get any side dishes at all.

34:44

So I think if you looked at if you’re a Korean American growing up and and what you saw, what you really enjoyed was your grandmother’s cooking, it’s not going to look the same.
But if you are from Korea, you’ll be able to see like you’ll be able to understand it’s like 1 type of Korean food.

35:01

There’s a multiple kind of Korean food and diversity of Korean food in Korea, perhaps a little less so in America, even though it’s like changing for more.
Korean Midwest fusion.
Yeah.
Yeah, so when did the idea for the second location first pop into your head?

35:24

2020, actually 2020-2021, yeah.
I suddenly had a lot of time, extra time on my hand with the pandemic.
So I was chosen as a cohort for Women’s Entrepreneurship and Leadership program at James Beard.

35:42

And our final project, we learned many different things, but our final project is doing a new business idea or a new big project idea.
And I was thinking about what to do and then what I thought was we use a lot of vegetables.

36:00

And every time I go to farmers market to pick something up, there are new vegetables or new farmers that I want to try.
But I am very loyal to farmers that we’ve been going to for the past 10 years, right?
So my carbon refrain became like, I wish I can buy more vegetables from you.

36:16

So that’s one motivation.
Another motivation is one of the things that we did to increase the sales was this special dinners, like buffet style dinners, like I try to build it like if if I were to invite you for a dinner party and I had a bunch of food just laid out and then you were, you were eating whatever you’d like, what they would look like.

36:36

And one of the dinners that we started doing was vegetarian dinners.
And what I noticed was that our food cost is about 25%, which is, which is actually good.
But for vegetarian dinners, the food cost was like 10%.

36:56

Because even the best local, yeah, even the best local vegetable is going to be cheaper than like a mediocre beef by a lot.
And tofu is delicious.
And I know how to work with tofu.
And I thought that’s a differentiator.

37:12

Like we’re not trying to create veg.
Like I wasn’t trying to create vegetarian dishes that are beef substitute.
I wasn’t doing like turducken or like Impossible meat or like fake burgers or like fake chicken Nuggets.
These are vegetarian dishes that Korean people just enjoy, even if they’re not vegetarians and have history of the dish goes like hundred 200 years.

37:39

What that tells me is that people had time to recipe test that thing instead of like coming up with a newfangled thing.
So I thought, you know, food cost is low and I was going to do my current restaurant is full service and I was going to do counter service.

37:57

Counter service usually takes fewer number of people.
So then I can make labor costs low and and competition smaller because there are fewer vegetarian only restaurants versus all the other different kind of food.
And I thought the vegetarian food that I can offer was really delicious and different than all the other vegetarian offerings in town.

38:20

So I had this idea in 2020-2021, presented it as a project.
And then last year I was accepted as one of the fellows for Tory Burch woman, Tory Burch Foundation Fellow.
And there we created a pitch deck as our final, final project.

38:41

So then I did the investment investor pitch deck for the same project.
I didn’t end up needing an investor because my current business partners are like, that’s a great idea, let’s go in and it doesn’t have to be such a big project that we’re going to need outside investor.
So, so now it’s going to come to reality hopefully in my first quarter of 2025.

39:06

Oh, so you’re close.
I mean, here we are recording this December 2024.
You’re talking about, you know, just a few months away that this could open.
Yeah.
I, we just got the building department permit, which is the most time consuming part.
So hopefully within first quarter, we’ll be open.

39:24

Is it in the same geography?
Is it nearby where your original location?
Yes, our neighbor restaurant just across the alleyway.
It’s really like 5 steps away from our main door to their main door.
They decided to shut the doors and that space became available.

39:42

And at the same time we’ve gotten so busy that we were running out of our walking space or prep tables and and I could not have more number of people in there.
So I figured that if we had a location that’s very next door, then we can use that for our advantage.

40:03

We can cross train the staff and share the staff.
We can cross.
We can.
Do all the vegetable preps in the vegetarian place and do only meat prep in the Miskim restaurant and still share.
So I thought there was a lot of advantage in having two locations close together and the fact that the service style is different.

40:24

Like one’s a full service restaurant, entrees are about 30 dollars $2932.00 and then the other one is fast casual and about $14.00.
I thought even though they’re next to each other, I can set it up in a way that it does not cannibalize the our current customer base, but it expand our the market to include new customer base.

40:49

Yeah, with such a different price point, it’s going to appeal to different folks.
Yeah.
And So what?
What’s the, what’s the name?
Is it, is it sharing the Miss Kim name?
Is it a little different or?
It’s a little different.
Lil’ Kim.
Yeah, it’s Lil’ Kim.

41:05

I like that.
It’s like, you know, when you go to Business School and you do like your guest persona.
I imagine that as a Gen.
Z vegetarian, younger sister of Miss Kim, really conscious of environment and sustainability.

41:20

They may not be fallen vegetarian or vegan, but they’re eating more and more vegetarian vegans.
So they’re flexitarian and they may want to bring their their family members to try actually tasty vegetarian foods, according to meat eaters.
OK, fun stuff.

41:39

Well, we look forward to following that and the the successful opening here coming in the following months.
Shifting gears a little bit on you, Jihe, I would like to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome, personal or professional, and maybe some lessons that you learned going through that.

41:56

I mean, we’ve already covered the going against the grid and doing a different labor structure.
That was really the biggest challenge.
We had to borrow money, operational cash to cover payroll in couple months, at least few months.

42:12

And I think how we overcame it is listen to the staff, especially when there is a big thing going on like the pandemic, but we have a staff meeting every week where everybody’s invited and they’re paid to be there.
It’s not, it’s not required, it’s optional.

42:31

But if you do come, you’re paid for your time to participate.
And that’s how we made adjustments that worked for us.
So the way that we started it, we started one way where there’s a rigid base pay and then there’s no tip shared at all.

42:48

And then we switched to shared tips and we switched to different roles and we we adjusted based on the staff feedback and what our customers are telling us.
And then I think that flexibility is really the biggest tool that we had to make it the make it work the way it is now, because if we kept the first iteration, we would have gone down, that wouldn’t have worked.

43:10

But because we kept sort of adjusting it and customizing it to our market and our need and our customer base, I think we were able to get to a point where that was really working for us.
So I think that’s one.
And then personally, in the middle of everything, I had to go through divorce.

43:33

Yeah.
And it wasn’t a contentious divorce, but divorce is still very like has an impact in your life.
And I let my partners know my investing partner is Pulinari.
And I was like, but that’s OK.

43:50

Like Carl and I are not fighting.
It’s just a matter of like filing it and then just going through the division of assets.
I’ll be OK.
And my partner Paul really encouraged me to take some time off, take time off, take time to grieve, take time to take care of myself and my my finances or whatever I needed.

44:16

He thought I needed the time and I I resisted it.
I said I cannot do that and the staff needs me and all of that stuff.
And then he stopped me and said they will step up for you and it’s OK to show that you’re going through stuff and sharing vulnerability is a leadership act and you it’s time for you to model that behavior for your staff.

44:43

So I called the staff meeting.
I share the difficult news and I, I don’t share my personal business very often with the staff, but I, I sat everybody down and I told them I am going through a divorce.
I’m going to be stepping way back.
So before I was working like 70 hours a week, but I think I cut that, cut it down to maybe 25 hours a week.

45:05

So I was in there enough, but I was like I, I am going to need you guys to step up and and run this restaurant without me being present as much.
And, and then I told the staff that I really trusted them that they will do a good job.

45:23

I think at the time when I said it, I only have to leave it.
It was more like a hope because I.
Make it till you make it.
Yeah, in my mind, but I didn’t tell them that.
That was just my negative voice talking.
And what ended up happening was I, no, it wasn’t perfect, but it was way better than I thought it was going to be.

45:44

People really did step up and then they try to do a good job and they communicated amongst themselves.
And what that ended up happening was I think if you are a founder and you’re the, you’re the only owner, like only operating owner, and then you’re running a small business, you have your hands on everything.

46:03

And delegating is very difficult and creating system that supports a delegation, it’s like it always goes into the back burner because you’re so you’re so busy dealing with trials and tribulations of everyday operation.

46:20

But it gave our entire team an opportunity to build the leadership team and build better systems and do it on their own.
And it’s sort of inadvertently empowered them to be more engaged and have their voices heard more than before.

46:39

And that wouldn’t have happened if I took this like a personally difficult time and then get heard my partner’s advice and then took a step back.
So that I, I think those two, those two things really stand out for me.

46:58

So it’s interesting, you know, as I talked to a lot of restaurateurs, this idea of delegation kind of gets forced on them when they open a new location, right?
And then maybe 1/3 or 4th or 5th.
And each time that they expand further, they kind of have to readjust what their role is and you know, how everybody else gets involved.

47:21

And so it’s interesting to hear in your case that that delegation moment was kind of forced by the challenging life situation that you were going through with your divorce.
And I can only imagine, I mean, it’s great that it wasn’t a contentious divorce, but it’s still a divorce.

47:39

Somebody that you were with for a long time and your lives were intertwined.
And there’s, you know, a lot of practical things that need to be attended to, but there’s also a lot of emotional things that that need to be.
Yeah, I in retrospect, I really needed the time.
I’ve been with my ex-husband like for 17 years.

47:56

We’ve been married for 12 years, together for five years before then.
So it was a a huge adjustment.
It was also a huge adjustment because I don’t have a single family member in Michigan.
Like I came back to Michigan to be in this marriage and the marriage was ending.

48:15

So I had to sort of sort through all of that, like emotionally and also intellectually, like questioning again, like who, who’s my community and, and what’s my personal life look like?

48:30

Like all those things need to be considered and be answered.
And it really gave me time to think about that and, and set me up to better adjust adjustment because this happened in 2019 and then 2020 pandemic hit.

48:45

If I didn’t prep myself to ask those questions and give myself time to heal and grieve and heal and then get used to the idea of being alone again, going through the pandemic without that would have been even way more difficult to adjust.

49:04

So was there ever any consideration to sort of pack it in and head back to New Jersey where you know you’ve got the support of family there?
Actually, yes, because my old boss called.
My old boss called and she asked how I was doing and then she offered a lot of money.

49:23

Like compared to what a independent restaurant owner can make when when you’re still struggling.
I think at the time, what she offered was 2 1/2 times more than my current salary.
Yeah.
And so I had a time to think about it.

49:41

Like I envisioned what my life would look like if I went back and like discarded my connection to food and running a small business and then went back to working for someone and, and doing something that felt a little bit like soul sucking when I was in it before.

50:03

And then I decided that I, I think I even when I’m not making enough money, like I rather just stick with what I have going on here.
And that was actually great because then it didn’t make me feel it felt, made me feel less like I was stuck because I thought about the options and I made a conscious choice to stick with Michigan and my business rather than kind of like having a faint like runaway fantasy and hoping for greener pastures without actually having any practical way of thinking about it.

50:40

It’s good to have options, you know, if for no other reason then you feel much better about the choice that you have ultimately committed to.
Absolutely.
And it also made me feel a little more bold, but it made me feel more bold to take that next step of like opening another restaurant or take the next step to go to Korea for a month without the without being checking into the staff because I’m going to Korea like 2 weeks to a month every year because I am leading a culinary tour to Korea.

51:14

So it made me feel emboldened to do that because I felt like if if things really crashed and burned, I had an option to go back to.
So it felt like an insurance policy.
Like psychologically, whether it’s really not real or not, I’m not sure.

51:30

But like, yeah, that was a good thing that happened.
You know, I want to go back to the innovative approach that you took to paying your employees because I, I, as I’m listening to you tell the story now a couple of times in our interview, it strikes me that there’s, there’s a duality there in your thought process that is very commendable looking back.

51:59

But in the moment, I imagine had to be a difficult struggle because you’re doing something that is very different than the norm, right?
And you are committed to seeing this through.
You really believe in your heart of hearts, it’s going to work.
But then you’re seeing that it needs some tweaks.

52:17

And it needs some changes, you know, rather than sort of throwing the whole structure away when you see that your labor costs are way higher than they should be by industry norms, You know, that would have been the easy thing to do, sort of scrap it and go to what everybody else is doing.
Tried and true, but you wanted to stay with it and you had the flexibility to make tweaks to it.

52:37

I mean, talk, talk to me about kind of how the the conversation was going in your head during this period.
The question that I consistently asked was have we done everything else before scrapping this all together?

52:52

Because I did really believe that was a better way to do it.
I mean like what other industry in America or in the world that has labor cost transfer to a customer To that end, when sales people get bonuses for their their sales achievements, they don’t get their salary cut to $20,000.

53:12

And then everything comes from the bonus in, in America, like you’re used to it, but in any, any other place, it just looks weird.
In Europe, you do like you, you tip a little bit as a show of appreciation, but it’s not like 20% of your paycheck.

53:31

I mean, not paycheck got your entire dining check.
So I think it helped that I really believe that that was the right way to do it and treat our workers.
And it also helped that I believe that industry will head that way and it’s slow.

53:47

Slowly but surely more states are doing away with tip credit.
More restaurants are finding their own customized way to deal with this.
You must see more restaurants doing service charges, for example, or they have like certain percentage of tips or a certain like sometimes they call it like a benefit fee.

54:09

So you see more fees being included in your check.
So I just knew that tide was going to eventually turn that way in practical day-to-day operation because I believe this strongly.
I didn’t rule out that we are going to scrap it if it get comes to comes to that.

54:32

But I was committed to doing like trying everything else before we scrap it.
So the knowledge that I talked to my partners ahead of time when it was really challenging and said, let’s scrap it if nothing else works.
So scraping was always an option.

54:47

So that actually made me feel more comfortable with continuing to do it, as paradoxical as it is.
And then I kept thinking of like different ways to like adjust a little here and change a little there and, and experiment and see what happens.

55:03

So I think that being open to experimentation and giving time to play out the experimentation and then then kind of following it with the data really helped.
Were you studying somebody else’s set up or you know, being able to learn from somebody who had made a similar transition?

55:24

I did work with this nonprofit organization.
They’re called the two different nonprofit now they split.
One is a rock which is called Restaurant Opportunity Center and the other one is called Raise.
So rock is the worker side, workers rights and workers better pay raise is the we or sometimes they’re known as High Road kitchens.

55:47

They’re the a group of restauranteurs and restaurant owners who’s committed to paying the staff better and treating them better.
So I had AI had people that I can call.
But I think at the end of the day, like every market is different.

56:03

Every every every staff pull is different.
So see like hearing what people did and getting ideas from that, but like customizing and creating your own plan rather than using somebody else’s experiment as a blueprint, I think really helped.

56:22

Our first iteration was the blueprint that didn’t work.
So then we kept changing it and changing it and changing it.
Let’s hear about the Korean culinary tours.
OK?
Yeah, this sounds interesting.
How does this work?
Our, one of our system businesses is called Zingerman’s Food Tours.

56:41

So they, what they do is, is actually really fun.
I’m, I’m really hoping to go to one of the Italian ones, Zingerman’s Delicatessen and Zingerman’s mail order import a lot of artisanal products from Europe.

57:00

And with that, they have relationships with like families that had made balsamic vinegar for generations or Parm consortium that make sure all the Parm Parmigiano Reggiano in Italy is made correctly and tasting correctly.

57:18

And using those connections.
Zingerman’s food tours make a customized culinary tour.
So you’re not just going to a bunch of restaurants, you’re actually meeting the makers and looking at the process and hearing their stories.
And when I saw this going on and the business has been going for a few years, I always say, well, we should have a Korean one.

57:40

We only go to Europe and, and I, I know artisans in Korea.
So we had our first Test 1 this past October and we have two scheduled in May and June.
We’re going to go meet kimchi master and and learn how to make kimchi.

58:00

We’re going to go to Chong Master.
Those are fermented mothers, sources of Korean.
And coincidentally, it just became inducted into intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO.
And we’re going to go meet a woman who’s been making that for generations and see her facility and try making it ourselves.

58:22

And hopefully we’ll be able to bring it in.
I don’t know.
And, and we’re going to, weather permitting, swim with the sea women of Cheju who are the sea foragers.
And, and like, unlike the rest of the country, they have been breadwinners for, for generations as women because before, like in everywhere else, women were kept as like a domestic partner, so to speak.

58:52

And they were not going out earning their own income, but these women did.
And they’re free divers.
So we’re not going to free dive per SE, but we’re going to meet them and we’re going to swim with them and learn their story, weather permitting, so.
What is it that they’re diving to get?

59:10

It differs based on seasons, so abalone is a big one.
Conch various different kind of shellfish.
So they’re just diving and grabbing those and then coming up and sell it.
So these are not farmed seafood.
These are all natural seafood and and we get to forage for those and then taste it at the end of the swimming session.

59:34

And these are the kind of experiences that it’s very not as easy to book as a foreign traveler unless you knew someone who knew someone and then set you up through introduction.
So how can somebody take part in this or learn more about it?

59:51

Go to their website.
I think it’s what’s the website address?
I think it’s, let me double check ithinkitszingermansfoodtours.com.
But you definitely can just yeah, you can definitely just Google it.
Yeah, yeah, zingermansfoodtours.com.

1:00:09

Zingermansfoodtours.com if you want to check this out and they’ve got ones to Korea that that you lead and they’ve got ones to different parts of Europe as well, if that’s.
Somebody, they have multiple ones in Italy, they have Canary Island, Spain, Copenhagen.
I think in Copenhagen you have a bike tour of eating tour.

1:00:27

So it’s like really reflecting local food culture and local artisans for that experience.
Gee, are there any mentors or books that have been helpful to you and your trajectory that you might want to call out?
Yeah, for for books.

1:00:45

I mean, I, I’m lucky enough to still read and write Koreans, so I get quite a bit of Korean books.
But the most inspirational Korean books have been the republished Korean cookbooks from 18th century, 19th century.

1:01:05

We have ones.
I, I think the oldest one that I have is a, a reprint of AI think maybe like 14 hundreds, but it’s mostly how to ferment everything.
And when you see 18th century and 19th century cookbooks, it gets, it starts to get really, really interesting because you can see the previous iterations of kimchi or dapokia or billing Bob and what that look like.

1:01:29

And it usually comes with a story.
So that’s, that’s one of I, I treat it like it’s a storybook.
So that’s for books that for mentor.
I have a woman who is in Chengcheng in Korea and that’s the, that’s where the Winter Olympics were.

1:01:50

So it’s a mountainous region in Korea, in the eastern seaboard.
And the area is really well suited for the vegetables.
So because the temperature difference between the daytime and the nighttime is significant because it’s a mountainous region, which makes the vegetables to work extra hard, which makes the vegetables more tasty.

1:02:14

It’s similar to like wine growing regions, like wine vine, wine vines that struggle a little more may yield a little less, but the flavor is better.
And in that region, there is this woman who makes the most amazing kimchi in Korea.

1:02:31

And her name is Pakwangi, and she’s my mentor.
And it’s really fun to chat with her because, one, she knows so much about kimchi and she’s still always researching and developing.
So she’s looking at all cookbooks, She’s talking to food chemists, and she’s having her kimchi analyzed.

1:02:51

So those are really fun.
And then two, because she knows everybody in Korea that’s a food artisan and she can point me to the right direction if I want to go talk to somebody who want, who makes kochujang or tanjang or soy sauce, or if I wanted to learn about Korean Buddhist cuisine, I can ask her who to go to.

1:03:12

And she and I talk like weekly, if not like multiple times a week, and I go see her twice a year so that like she would be my mentor.
That’s great.
Gee, hey, I’ve just got one more question for you.
But before I ask it, I want to do 2 things for everybody listening today.

1:03:30

I know that you love today’s content.
Hit the like, share or Subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.
Gee, hey, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you.
We’ve got Miss Kim annarbor.com for your restaurant.
Well, how else would you like people to connect with you?

1:03:46

Misskeymanarbor.com has a form you can fill out and we definitely monitor that.
But the best way to reach me is actually through Instagram messaging.
So if you go to Chef Jihe Kim on Instagram, then you’ll or you can go to Miss Kim Ann Arbor and then and then in the profile you can see my profile link to it.

1:04:07

If you send me a message, I answer it.
And Jihei is spelled JIHYE for those listening.
And on our website when we post this, we’ll have links to all of her profiles in the show notes, folks.

1:04:22

So be easy for you to get to.
OK.
So last question for you, Jiha, I’m curious how you see your business evolving and say I don’t know the next two to five years.
What do you think the changes are that are coming?
I think one thing I want to say about the wisdom of working with Zingerman’s community of business is that we experiment, but we don’t necessarily make fast changes and everything we do starts with the vision.

1:04:55

So this year is a big year for Miss Kim as well as the new restaurant little Kim in a sense that it’s time to update our five year vision on where we’re headed.
And my guess is that, you know, I, I told you that I had a idea for Little Kim in 2020-2021 and it’s only coming to fruition 4-5 years later.

1:05:17

And Miss Kim also took about five years from ideation to brick and mortar restaurant.
So I have to sort through some of these ideas.
And a lot of these ideas came about during the pandemic because we were asked to pivot so much as an industry and we tried many different things.

1:05:35

So the biggest vision that I have is that Miss Kim and Little Kim continue to improve and do what we do really well and that will show in customer service experience as well as the staff experience.

1:05:50

So I want to see higher staff retention and maybe more benefits offered.
I want to see customers having a really good time.
And besides that, we want to think about consumer packaged products or sauces that we have that everybody’s always trying to buy in bulk.

1:06:09

And I think unlike the brick and mortar locations that we are asked to stay in our county, consumer packaged products, the market’s a lot bigger than our local market.
So I think that would be really interesting.

1:06:25

I want to continue to expand my network and community of like minded chefs and then have them come and, and try collaboration dinners with me and, and, and then I go to their restaurant and then so there is this exchange of food and ideas and community.

1:06:47

So that’s one of the ideas.
And then like operationally, I want to continue to grow the leadership team and refine the processes and systems that we have so we make things easier for people to do what they do well.

1:07:06

That’s terrific.
Well, GA, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today.
I really appreciate it.
Anthony, thank you so much for having me and hearing my story.
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
Thanks for learning with us today.