Chicago's Hottest Chef: Won Kim Visits Mospratt Street
Chicago's Hottest Chef: Won Kim Visits Mospratt Street
Kimski's secret sauce
If you like Polish food, try Kimski.
If you like Korean food, try Kimski.
If you like traditional Polish or Korean food, walk right past Kimski and head northish, where you’ll find plenty to sate you in Koreatown and the Polish Triangle.
Chef Won Kim will wave as you pass by. There’s nothing traditional on his fusion menu, and he likes that just fine.
“I've had plenty of you know, Koreans and Polish, and they will come in and just be disappointed. I'm like: This isn't for you.”
But then Kim, the chef partner at Kimski —the restaurant next to Maria’s on 3st Street that you don’t go through to get to the bar’s patio —has never been ordinary.
“I never had any desire to be a chef and run a kitchen. Like I don't give a s***,” he said. “I just wanted to live life and you know, be a creative or whatever it's called, and you know, roam the earth kung fu style—but here I am.”
Whaaat?
He means it. Still, the creative life hasn’t left him, and we’d argue the freewheeling life hasn’t, either. Kim also DJ’s part-time and paints full time. Graffiti art, mostly.
“Again, it's just kind of freestyle— same way, the art, the DJ sets, and everything kind of come together, I just kind of figure it out on the fly,” he said.
“I'm one of those kinds of people that just like, likes to see someone's fridge for the first time and be like ‘Oh, you got mayonnaise, you got this, you got that, I'll make a dinner.’”
He’ll tell you, too, exactly how his genius magic comes together (our words, not his), no minced words (pun half-intended) and no-holds-barred. We’ll be bleeping his chat with audio precision.
Take the story with how he got started in all of this: “So my friends had a house party in an apartment in Lakeview at the time, and they loved the turntables on the kitchen floor. It was one of those kinds of parties.”
But wait — we can’t give it all away here. Tune in Friday just before 6:25 p.m. to hear more about one of the hottest chefs in town and one of Bridgeport’s very own.
You’ll hear:
Why he thinks Bridgeport is the perfect place for restaurant experiments like Kimski
How his mom influenced his cooking
How music, art and cooking entwine to shape his life.
The secret to Kimski’s fantastic sauce.
While we’re bleeping away, we promise to cut nothing. This is one Bridgeporter you just might want to open your refrigerator — and one you won’t want to miss.