Last month’s Marketplace Changes featured Min Kyu Kim, the young restaurantrepreneur (to coin a portmanteau) who’d just opened his ninth Kimchi Box fast-casual eatery on Plymouth Rd.
He hasn’t dropped his dream of expanding Kimchi Box to a thousand locations, but meanwhile he has plowed some profits into more elegant fare: He purchased and reopened ORAM (previously Of Rice and Men), the full-service restaurant and lounge in the spacious digs beneath the Blue LLama Jazz Club on S. Main.
“We’re soft-open right now, slowly getting into things,” Kim says. He’s awaiting the liquor license transfer and the arrival of chefs from South Korea and New York City, recruited with the help of an industry consultant with Michelin two-star power. “My philosophy is there’s always people better than me at something,” Kim says. “This kind of stuff especially—I’ve never done this level.”
Raised in Ann Arbor in a restaurant family, he’s finding it “fun” to think outside the Kimchi Box formula in evolving ORAM’s menu, which still favors sushi but has already added such dishes as mushroom dolsot, cooked in a hot stone bowl and topped with marinated short rib, and the Peruvian/Japanese midori verde, a whole cauliflower roasted with an aji sauce of cilantro, mayonnaise, and jalapeño.
“I feel like an artist with a blank canvas,” Kim smiles. He expects to eventually rebrand, host a grand opening, and expand a concept of “modern, high-end Asian restaurants” in order to “bring a fresh taste and fresh cuisine into mainstream America.”
ORAM, 312 S. Main. Tues.–Sun. 5 p.m.–10 p.m. Closed Mon. ofriceandmen.com
