Beyond Barbecue
Korean culture has skyrocketed in popularity over the years, from drama to pop music. That also extends to food, and there’s so much more to Korean cuisine than bibimbap and bulgogi. Traditional Korean restaurants have been a staple in Southeast Michigan’s dining scene for decades, but a new crop of owners is pushing the cuisine forward while staying true to its roots.
GROWING UP IN the Ann Arbor area, Miri Kim and her family would enjoy many meals together at Korean restaurants. They were often large gatherings, with at least six to eight family members gathered around the table.
They would frequent restaurants like Seoul Garden in Ann Arbor, with the adults grilling the food and passing it to the kids. The table would be covered in an assortment of dishes, many of them what Kim says is comfort food.
“When we went out, it was either a special occasion and we were celebrating something or there was a logistical reason why it was easier to go out to eat than to cook. … Looking back, [going out to eat] was definitely to satisfy that taste of home that my grandparents and my parents were missing as immigrants,” she says.
When she was younger, she was “a Korean food purist” with very specific thoughts on how a dish should be—and shouldn’t. But that mind-set has evolved over the years, especially now that her father, Harold, owns Black Ginger at the Trumbull & Porter Hotel in Detroit’s Corktown. While they were creating the Korean American menu, she realized one challenge in cooking Korean food in the Midwest is that traditional ingredients can be difficult to source in Michigan. Ingredients that are more widely available in South Korea are not available here, and even if they are, they lack the same flavor or texture, like fish cakes.
“You can source the ingredients, but it doesn’t taste the same,” says Kim, who wears a lot of hats at Black Ginger, including communications manager. “And so a lot of times, you have to come up with something new or you make something out of what you do have available to you.”
Korean culture, from pop music to dramas, has skyrocketed in popularity in the U.S., especially the food. As the cuisine becomes more mainstream, permeating every corner of the food industry from snack foods to fine dining, the creativity and innovation of chefs and restaurants have flourished. In Southeast Michigan, Kim and her father are part of a wave of newer restaurants offering their unique contemporary spin on Korean cuisine while still paying homage to tradition.
Korean barbecue restaurants and diner-type places with extensive menus have always been fixtures on Southeast Michigan’s dining scene, many of them opened by immigrants.
There have been three major waves of immigration to the U.S. from Korea — 1903-49, 1950-64 and 1965 to present — often driven by political and economic forces in their home country that prompted Koreans to seek safety and better opportunities. As a result of the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, many Koreans fled their homes as refugees, immigrating to other countries, including the U.S. On Oct. 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into law, which abolished the quota system based on race and ethnicity that discriminated against non-northern Europeans and Asians. After the law was passed, the Korean immigrant population grew significantly. Due to political, economic and military relations between South Korea and the U.S. in the ensuing years, the population increased from just 11,000 in 1960 to 290,000 in 1980, according to the Migration Policy Institute. While many Koreans live in New York or L.A., some planted roots in Michigan where today, Koreans are the fourth-largest Asian group after Indian, Chinese and Filipino.
Neighboring countries like China and Japan have had a lot of influence on Korean culture through trade and occupation. “What has come to be authentically Korean, traditionally Korean food is still very impacted by historical context and historical circumstances,” Kim says.
That influence can be seen at restaurants like China Café in Novi, owned and operated by Kelly Chang.
Chang, who is Chinese, grew up in South Korea, and he came to the U.S. in 1980 when his family moved amid worsening relations between North and South Korea.
He and his wife opened China Café in 1997, offering a wide array of Asian dishes, including Korean Chinese, which is very popular in South Korea, Chang says.
Two of the most popular examples of Korean Chinese are the noodle dishes jjamppong (a spicy noodle soup with seafood, meat and vegetables) and jjajangmyeon (noodles with black bean sauce), the latter developed by Chinese immigrants living in Incheon, Korea, and adapted to Korean tastes.
There used to be more Korean dishes on China Café’s menu, but as the business grew and the clientele changed, that part of the menu was reduced. In recent years, Chang has brought some Korean items at Jia Lounge, an intimate craft cocktail lounge with a wide-ranging menu that includes spicy Korean wings and bulgogi tacos, Korean flavors in familiar dishes that have grown in popularity at restaurants all over the country.
“Koreans have done a great job introducing their cuisine to the whole world,” Chang says.
At Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, chef and managing partner Ji Hye Kim, who has garnered James Beard Awards semifinalist nods for her take on Korean food, is very intentional and respectful of culinary tradition and history, telling the story of a dish’s roots in Korea and how Michigan has shaped that story.
One distinctive characteristic of Korean food is the use of fermentation, from kimchi to sauces, which bring “so much complexity and flavor,” Ji Hye Kim says.
She says the barrier to learning how to cook Korean food is low and it’s easy to learn. For example, Korean barbecue staples like bulgogi and galbi entail essentially taking a cut of meat and marinating it in a complex, well-balanced sauce, typically made with soy sauce, garlic, scallions, sesame oil and a sweetening agent like honey or sugar. It’s then cooked—either pan-fried or grilled—and the result will give cooks and diners a lot of satisfaction without a lot of difficulty.
“If you can make a salad dressing, you can make bulgogi and galbi pretty easily,” she says.
It’s once you start digging deeper and get into fermenting ingredients on your own rather than using store-bought staples that it gets more complex, “because now you’re thinking, like, salinity percentage, you’re thinking pH level, you’re thinking microbiotic stuff,” says Ji Hye Kim, who recently took a trip to Korea focused on fermentation and was surprised to see a lot of home cooks, especially in the countryside, making their own fermented sauces.
“[With] better fermented sauces, the quality of the food starts really jumping to another level,” Ji Hye Kim says.
The food in South Korea is extremely diverse, she notes.
“You see, like, a TikTok trend food, you see street food that leans more on the entertainment and wow factors than on flavor. And then you have grandmothers who’ve been fermenting stuff for 10, 15 years before they even start using it,” she says. Price ranges widely too, from $3 a person for street food to several hundred dollars for Michelin-level meals.
“There’s so many different types of Korean food in Korea, and people are not as afraid of the tyranny of authenticity there, I think partially because people understand food evolves based on where you are. … they’re not afraid to play with food, or try different things with Korean food, without feeling threatened to lose the tradition, because they still have one foot firmly rooted in tradition.”
That approach is becoming more common in Korean restaurants in Michigan and the rest of the U.S. as well.
In addition to the staple Korean barbecue and traditional restaurants, now there is more variety with fine-dining restaurants and spots specializing in one type of food, similar to what can be found in New York or L.A., where there are large and vibrant Koreatowns. In Michigan, there’s So Poong in Commerce Township, which offers different versions of kimbap (seaweed rice rolls), and Kimchi Box, a chain that offers the popular Korean corn dogs as well as Korean fried chicken.
Nali and Andy Kwon started serving Korean fried chicken, known for its sticky sweet sauce lacquered over crispy pieces of chicken, when they opened Noori Chicken in Clawson in late 2021.
Andy was studying business administration at the University of Southern California when the pandemic hit, so he joined his sister in Rochester Hills, where she lived with her husband and two young children. The two siblings decided to go into the restaurant business together.
While the pandemic hit restaurants hard, the Kwons saw opportunity because people wanted takeout options and their location became one of the best-selling spots in the company, which has franchises all over the country. The business took off and it wasn’t long before they started thinking about the next step: opening a dine-in restaurant.
They thought about doing a traditional Korean restaurant “but we decided that it’s better to sell culture. It’s better to provide customers with cultural experience than just food. Great food, you can find it anywhere. But providing customers with that culture, Korean drinking culture, is what I think made our restaurant so popular,” Andy Kwon says.
That vibrant culture is on display at the cozy Noori Pocha, which seats only 11 with a handful of tables outside, and the small space fosters a boisterous atmosphere—and can lead to long waits. The space, designed by Nali Kwon’s husband, Youjin Kim, with the vibe and aesthetic largely inspired by Korean TV drama “Reply 1988.”
The top two dishes are bulgogi and kimchi fried rice, one of Chef Sanghwan Bak’s signature dishes. The bulgogi is marinated for a day and then portioned to be cooked to order, with smoky flavor imparted by use of a blow torch. It’s served with banchan (side dishes), including Gyeran Mari (rolled egg omelet) and housemade kimchi. Noori Pocha’s kimchi uses less fish and shrimp sauce than traditional kimchi and is a little sweeter and more refreshing, says Nali Kwon, who did a lot of the recipe development in collaboration with Bak. Those two dishes typify the Korean American offerings at Noori Pocha, while dishes like Jokbal (braised pork hocks) and Ddak-Bbokeum-Tang (braised spicy chicken) are traditional Korean fare. Jokbal, another signature of Bak’s, is a labor-intensive dish that requires hours of cooking, and the team is especially proud of it, having come up with the recipe after many hours of testing. They didn’t see it on the menu at many restaurants, so that’s why they wanted to offer it at Noori Pocha.
At Black Ginger, they take ideas and inspiration from traditional Korean and flavors, “and then do something a little bit fun, a little bit out of the box with it,” Kim says, adding the dishes are shaped and informed by her dad and chef Jorge Morales’ immigrant experiences and food memories. “There are a lot of unexpected combinations, and a lot of collaborative flavors happening.”
For the Korean fried chicken, they dip a boneless piece of chicken made tender by a citrus brine into a batter made with alkaline water to ensure maximum crispiness. It’s tossed with a sweet and tangy sauce. The dish is served with sesame vinaigrette and cabbage slaw.
In traditional Korean restaurants, a parade of banchan will greet diners when they sit at the table. Black Ginger doesn’t do banchan in the typical sense but does similar-type dishes as appetizers and sides such as a quick pickle cucumber that’s seasoned with typical kimchi seasonings, including gochugaru, so it evokes that flavor without the fermentation.
The Galbi Jjim (braised short rib, coconut and taro purée, demi glaze and crispy onions) is another early customer favorite. The short ribs are braised for 3 hours in a master beef stock that is used over and over again, resulting in a “broth that just keeps getting more flavorful and better,” Miri Kim says. The beef is portioned out and cooked to order with more braising liquid and served with taro coconut purée and a sauce that’s a twist on the traditional galbi sauce, combining the familiar sweet and soy flavors in a demi glaze. Miri Kim points out the taro coconut purée is not a traditional Korean dish but says it marries well with the short rib, typifying Black Ginger’s desire to create something new and different.
Kim’s dad, Harold, is a longtime restaurateur, including owning and operating Izakaya Sanpei in Canton. But he’d been looking for something that “hits a little bit closer to home” as a Korean American and the space at Trumbull & Porter became available. They held their grand opening on May 15.
“I want [Black Ginger dishes like Galbi Jjim] to evoke those food memories, if people come in having had kind of a similar experience that I have, where they have certain expectations of what the dish is going to taste like based on having had Korean food before,” she says. She hopes customers will try the dishes with an open mind. “[It’s not] traditional in a lot of senses, but it’s still really satisfying, and it still satisfies that flavor that I thought I was going to get, but also it offers me something new that I’ve never had before. And I think riding that line is something that we try to do in a lot of the food that we offer.”
Black Ginger
1331 Trumbull, Ste. 100, Detroit
blackgingerdetroit.com
China Cafe and Jia Lounge
24299 Novi Rd., Novi
chinacafenovi.com
Miss Kim
415 N. 5th Ave., Ann Arbor
misskimannarbor.com
Noori Pocha
1 S. Main St., Clawson
nooripocha.com
Dorothy Hernandez is a freelance journalist who frequently writes about food at the intersection of culture, entrepreneurship and social justice. She could eat galbi and bo-ssam every day and never get tired of it.
