Ji Hye Kim

On a pleasant Tuesday night in late April, the dining room at Miss Kim filled up not once, but twice.

The guests, including a flock of food journalists, were there for a special dinner featuring a menu that owner Ji Hye Kim drew from two new cookbooks—Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home by New York Times columnist (and NYT Cooking video star) Eric Kim, and Koreatown, coauthored by chef Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard, the editor of TASTE, an online magazine that focuses on chefs and independent restaurants.

Rodbard and Eric Kim were on hand, and Kim interviewed them as diners sampled crudités with three kinds of Korean-inspired dips, a savory pork stew (tofu for vegetarians), and Kim’s signature tteokbokki (rice dumplings) with a flavorful marinara-type sauce.

Writer Jia Jung flew in from San Francisco for the event. “I see [Kim] as a member of the community,” says Jung, who’d previously interviewed her for an article in Saveur magazine. “There’s the culinary community, the Ann Arbor community, the Korean community, and [the community] advocating for women business owners.”

Now, many are celebrating Miss Kim’s comeback. Like many restaurants, it was pummeled by the pandemic, which nearly put it out of business.

Born in South Korea, Kim moved with her family to New Jersey when she was thirteen. Then, she had only recently begun to learn English, but Korean has few similarities with any other language, save for some words from Chinese and Japanese. “For a Korean-speaking person to learn any other language is challenging,” she says. But at that young age, and being immersed in English, she learned the language quickly.

Arriving in Ann Arbor as a U-M undergrad, Kim earned a BA in economics and political science in 2002. She moved back to New Jersey to work for a hospital billing company, but returned to Ann Arbor in 2007 with her now-ex-husband. She replied to an ad for a cheesemonger at Zingerman’s Deli and took the job—even though, she told CNBC in May, it paid almost $90,000 less than her previous job.

She learned Zingerman’s from the inside out, including its path to partnership for employees starting new local food businesses. In 2011, with Zingerman’s sponsorship, she set up a food cart, San Street, at the now-defunct Mark’s Carts on W. Washington. That led to Miss Kim, which opened in late 2016 serving Korean food based on Michigan ingredients.

Related: Miss Kim Opens: Ji Hye Kim plans a slow rollout
Miss Kim: Korean by Zingerman’s

The restaurant lost money in its first three years—which isn’t uncommon. Kim was hoping to break even in 2020. Then Covid hit.

Governor Whitmer twice halted indoor restaurant service, putting Miss Kim in survival mode. Revenues, which topped $1.2 million in fiscal 2019, plummeted to $963,000 in the fiscal year ending July 2021.

“We entertained a lot of scenarios,” Kim says. “We talked about shutting it down. We talked about not renewing the lease. We talked about maybe changing the concept. We talked about everything.”

It survived, she says, because “we stayed open to all possibilities, and we were nimble.” With the dining room closed, she cut the staff from twenty to twelve, retraining some servers for jobs in the kitchen and filling take-out orders. A $184,405 federal Paycheck Protection Program Loan helped cover the remaining employees’ salaries and was subsequently forgiven.

“It was a little bit of stop and go, stop and go,” Kim says. “But when we were finally able to reopen, there was no more stopping.”

The staff has since rebounded to thirty people. Revenue hit $1.89 million in fiscal 2023, with a net profit of $101,000, and Kim says she is on track to exceed those figures this year. Kim owns 51 percent of the business, with Zingerman’s cofounders Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig dividing the rest.

Saginaw credits Miss Kim’s survival to Kim’s tenacity. “There are very, very few people who are as hard a worker as she is,” he says. “She’s serious but with a great sense of humor. She doesn’t give up. It wasn’t us. It was all her effort. She was the one who was going to do everything to keep it going.”

Related: Keeping Zingerman’s Zingerman’s

As Kim was struggling to keep things going, her restaurant was getting national attention.

In September 2021, she was tapped as one of the country’s Best New Chefs by Food & Wine magazine. Feature stories, videos, photographs, and recipes in Food & Wine followed, along with Kim’s list of Ann Arbor recommendations (including Spencer, Bløm Meadworks, and the path circling Argo Pond).

The honor came on top of Kim’s 2020 nomination by the James Beard Awards as Best Chef: Great Lakes, followed by a 2022 nomination as the country’s outstanding chef. She has nabbed two Beard nominations since, although she has not won.

“I thought it was really sweet and unexpected,” Kim said of the attention, which brought invitations to numerous industry events and a much higher social media profile. She’s also seeing more out-of-town visitors seeking her upscale Korean cuisine.

One of the guests at the dinner was Rachel Liu Martindale, owner of Q Bakehouse & Market, which opened on Valentine’s Day in the small shopping center at Jackson and Dexter roads. She says Kim was one of her first customers, posing for an Instagram photo at the bakery.

“Ji Hye is a pillar in the Ann Arbor food scene,” Martindale says. “There aren’t many other Asian-American women food business owner-chefs, and I love what she represents as a minority in this area.”

The cookbook evenings continue this month, when Miss Kim hosts Khushbu Shah, author of Amrikan: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora on July 2. “We absolutely love trying different foods,” Kim says. “Sometimes we are tired of fried tofu at the restaurant, ’cause we’re there every day.”

She’s also set to lead her first tour of Korea next year for Zingerman’s Food Tours, taking a dozen guests to visit markets, farmers, and artisanal food producers. The first session, priced at $12,500, not including airfare, sold out immediately, leading Food Tours to add a second trip that also sold out.

Beyond that, Kim, forty-six, says she’s got “five different documents” for directions she’d like to take in her personal and professional life. Saginaw, who has helped shepherd Kim’s growth from Deli employee to food-truck owner to restaurateur, says he’s proud of her achievements.

“I couldn’t be happier for her,” he says. “I think it’s about time, and she deserves all of it.”