The business calculus involved in opening any expensive restaurant is complex. It is all the more so in the US for restaurateurs/chefs seeking to feature the foods of a cuisine that isn’t very prominent in the market they want to open a restaurant in; especially when the market, broadly speaking, still does not have a very sophisticated understanding of non-mainstream cuisines (in most parts of the US, this would be anything other than American, Italian and Mexican cuisines). The market I am most interested in, obviously, is Minnesota, specifically the Twin Cities metro. This is a region in which, in the year 2024, many East Asian groceries of one kind or the other still bill themselves as “Oriental” and where even in food-centered groups on Facebook requests for recommendations for Chinese restaurants routinely receive responses that list Thai or Vietnamese restaurants (or vice versa). This is not to say that there are not a lot of restaurants in the Twin Cities that specialize in the cuisines of different parts of Asia; merely that these remain largely marginal and outside the purview of the prominent food media outlets that disseminate knowledge of the local scene.

It may not be surprising in such a context that the few expensive restaurants—aimed largely at out-culture diners—centered on Asian cuisines that have managed to last have focused on East Asian cuisines that are prominent at the lower end of the market: think Ann Ahmed’s restaurants or Hai Hai, or the recently-closed Ngon Bistro, all of which centre(d) Southeast Asian cuisines at least familiar to the (mostly-white) foodie market they target. A chef/restaurateur seeking to centre a less familiar cuisine has to contend with more difficulties still. Low knowledge/experience in the market of the cuisine in question means a double bind of sorts: on the one hand a chef in a place like the Twin Cities can’t put out a high-end menu that riffs on more traditional dishes that diners are already familiar with; on the other, putting out more recognizable dishes, they will always run the risk of being compared unfavourably on price with the few cheaper restaurants that are present in the market. And so they have to hedge their bets.

Take, for example, Korean food and the career of the chef behind the restaurant I am reviewing today: Ann Kim of the eponymous Kim’s. A Korean American from Apple Valley, Kim first came to local prominence at Pizzeria Lola. It was not until her second restaurant, Young Joni—which brought her a Beard award and national recognition—that she began to feature Korean dishes and flavours more significantly on her menus. But here too they were not, and are still not, the central focus. The restaurant she opened next, buoyed by the national recognition from that Beard award, Sooki & Mimi, continued in the vein of Young Joni. It had some Korean dishes on the menu—including the best thing we ate at our meal there in late-2021—but the focus was predominantly on her take on Mexican food (one of the more bankable immigrant cuisines in the high-end of the Twin Cities restaurant market). Sooki & Mimi received a lot of positive press, and it was my impression that it was a successful restaurant, but Kim closed it down just a couple of years into its run and last year opened her newest restaurant, Kim’s in the same space.

Here, finally, is Ann Kim’s Korean restaurant. Not a something else+some Korean dishes restaurant but a full-on Korean restaurant. (The restaurant bills itself as Korean American but that seems like it’s mostly a hedge against criticism from a purist position.) There is nothing on the current food menu—well, not counting the desserts—that is not Korean. As it stands now, this is not the place to go to for undifferentiated or pan-Asian food or dishes from the New American playbook that have had a little gochujang or kimchi added to them. This is a Korean restaurant. And it’s not a cheap one. Coming into a market where there aren’t even very many affordable Korean restaurants, it is obviously a gamble. Will it pay off? Only time will tell, but I am happy to say, based on a recent dinner there, that at the level of the food the restaurant is a success. We have some quibbles about some larger choices and there was one thing that we really did not like but if you are not very familiar with Korean food you should know that at Kim’s you will eat a pretty good contemporary articulation of it.

And with that I finally get to our actual meal, which we ate this past Friday with two discerning diners who have been eating Korean food all of their lives: our boys.

It had been two and a half years since our dinner at Sooki & Mimi so I can’t be very sure but the restaurant’s interior seemed largely unchanged. I think the large, striking mural on the alley-side of the building is new but things inside seemed quite familiar. There’s a bar area as you enter—it was full—and then the large, main dining room. This was also largely full at 7 pm on a Friday. The restaurant, as of this month, now takes reservations and unless your schedule is flexible it seems like a good idea to get one if you’re going for dinner on the weekend. We were seated at a booth by a large window and quickly got down to bidness.

The menu, cannily, is not over-large. This is not the market, as I noted above, in which it would make sense to peddle very (to non-Koreans) esoteric  Korean dishes. The menu is divided into four sections: Snacks, Banchan, Korean BBQ and Plates & Bowls. The first comprises six dishes, the second four, the third, three, and the fourth, six as well. So that’s a total of 19 dishes, of which three are very small format. We ate across the sections.

From Snacks we got the Korean Fried Chicken Wings, the Bindaetteok and the Bubbling Egg Souffé. The first two were very good and the third was excellent, even if we’re more used to eating this dish not as a “snack”/starter but alongside more robust dishes. Of those robust dishes we got three: two from the Korean BBQ section and one from the Plates & Bowls section. From the former, the LA Style Grilled Kalbi was quite good and the Spicy Sakura Pork Bulgogi was even better. The flavour on the galbi was very nice but there was something slightly off about the texture in my view, with a slight sponginess to the meat past the char on the surface. The pork bulgogi, however, was unimpeachable. The boys liked even more the Fire Chicken from the Plates & Bowls section, specifically its cheesiness—the missus and I could have taken or left it.

The Banchan section was more problematic. At the prices Kim’s charges for the mains—$35 for a not-over large portion of galbi, for example—one might expect at least one small round of banchan or at least refills to be included (keep in mind that at good Korean BBQ restaurants in cities with large Korean populations even the steamed egg/egg souffle would be included as a side). But you have to pay. The larger issue though is what we got after we paid for it. The Namul Trio cost $10 and featured tiny portions of highly unmemorable seasoned Korean squash, bean sprouts and cucumbers. But the Napa Kimchi was even worse, being wildly over-fermented. We drew this to our server’s attention, asking if there was another batch we could get some from. She said there was not and offered to take it away and off our bill. We first said no as we don’t like sending food back but after another tentative nibble asked for it to be swapped out for the Dongchimi or white radish kimchi. This was much better, even if it wasn’t served with any of the water that is almost definitionally a part of dongchimi. We also had to pay $3 apiece for small bowls of rice but whatever: almost no high-end restaurants give you bread for free either anymore.

And so to dessert. There were only two on offer and neither was particularly Korean (to be fair, there isn’t a lot of low hanging fruit in the Korean dessert category). Indeed, the Carrot Cake had no Korean component at all (they served the pecans on the side as our boys are allergic to most tree nuts). The Tiramisu apparently has misugaru in it but it was not palpable. Both were very good, however. Indeed the missus proclaimed the desserts her favourite part of the meal.

Oh yes, drinks. I had a very nice cocktail to start: the Smoky & Mommy, a take on the Paloma (the name is obviously a pun on the name of Kim’s previous restaurant but to what end, I don’t know). The missus got the one makgeolli (a rice wine/beer) they have on the menu along with the mains, while I switched then to a glass of riesling. The boys were satisfied with Cokes.

For a look at the restaurant, the menu and what we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down for thoughts on service, to see how much it all cost and for comments on the overall experience.

The dining experience was a mixed bag. We sat down at 7 pm and had ordered by 7.05 pm. The food came out very quickly and by 8 pm we were done with the savoury dishes; we were out the door before 8.30 pm. When you’re paying, as we did, $286 for dinner, you might want to linger a little more. The server who took our orders and who said she was going to be taking care of us for the evening was pleasant but seemed a little hurried. Halfway through the meal somebody else took over our table and they seemed almost surprised that we wanted dessert. Speaking of the price, it includes a 21% surcharge. No further tip is expected and there is no tip line on the credit card slip. Counting our boys as one hungry adult, the effective per head cost all-in, with three alcoholic drinks and two soft drinks, was about $95. Which seems about right in the current Twin Cities market in a restaurant of this kind for what we ate and drank, maybe a bit on the high side.

The one big problem we encountered food-wise—the kimchi—might have been an off batch. I’m sure Chef Kim knows that kimchi at that stage of fermentation is great for fried rice or kimchi jigae but not for banchan but clearly whoever was expediting in the kitchen that night either didn’t know or didn’t care—and given the profile of diners in the house that night, not too many people may have cared either anyway. (I will note here, however, that the kimchi at our meal at Young Joni in 2019 was also woefully subpar.) As for wishing that the banchan were at least refilled once or more memorable (given the price) or that ssamjang and lettuce were included with the galbi instead of being a $5 add-on, I fully grant that those are also quibbles people who don’t eat Korean food (out) much may not have.

The big question: would we come back? The answer for us, I’m afraid, is probably not; at least not for a dinner like this one. But the reason for that is specific to us: the missus is a well above-average Korean home cook and given our twice-yearly visits to Los Angeles—where we bounce between the Korean enclaves of Koreatown and Garden Grove—and now what will be regular visits to Seoul, eating Korean food out in the Twin Cities is not a huge priority; and though most of what we ate at Kim’s was very good, there was nothing particularly revelatory or interesting about it for people who eat Korean food at home most days of the week. But that’s not going to be the case for most people looking to eat at Kim’s—certainly the vast majority of the diners last Friday night were not Asians of any kind, leave alone Korean—and to them I would recommend the restaurant.

What we might come back for, if we were in the neighbourhood for something else, is bindaetteok and the fried chicken wings at the bar along with a cocktail. But before we do that we’ll have to visit Juche, the current incarnation of what used to be Cook St. Paul, which also serves Korean food. But that won’t be till later in the summer as we’re headed to Los Angeles again in June and will eat a lot of Korean food there.

Alright, my next restaurant report will be of an Indian dinner in New York. That’ll go up on Thursday. On the weekend I’ll have a report on a high-end Korean meal in Seoul and maybe another Seoul report as well. Let’s see how it goes.

Note: The version of this post that was originally published 12 hours ago was not the final draft and was missing the second half of the second paragraph. It has now been restored along with a few other edits.

---