CHICAGO _ No one's food tastes quite like chef Bill Kim's. Now we know why. "Korean BBQ" details many of the genre-bending dishes that make his restaurants, BellyQ and Urban Belly, so irresistible.
That said, if you're looking for an introduction to the basics of traditional Korean barbecue, the kind originally from South Korea and now popping up all over Chicago, then this is probably not the book for you. Sure, there is a recipe for Korean barbecue sauce and a lot of grilled food, but approximately 95 percent of the recipes stray from what could reasonably be defined as authentic or traditional Korean barbecue.
Most recipes feature ingredients from other Asian countries and even other continents. That includes such offerings as Korean pesto sauce, Seoul to Buffalo shrimp, and hoisin baked beans with bacon barbecue crust. But Kim is still confident about the book's title. "It's Korean barbecue, but it's our family's way," says Kim over the phone. "Someone can always do a traditional Korean barbecue book better than me, but I can be me."
In other words, the book, co-written with Plate magazine editor and Chicago food writer Chandra Ram, and being released on April 17, reflects Kim's own remarkable cooking journey, starting with his family's immigration from South Korea to Chicago. He was 7 years old at the time, and it wasn't an easy move. "I struggled to find my identity when I moved here," says Kim. In the introduction of the book, he writes, "I didn't speak the language, and I missed my friends in Seoul." He also hadn't yet changed his name to Bill, and he goes into detail about what people thought of his Korean name, Bum-Suk: "Imagine going to elementary school and trying to fit in and make friends with (a name) like that!"
But he did enjoy helping his parents make traditional Korean dishes like kimchi, and loved when they would make Korean barbecue at local parks. "We used to have family gatherings at the (Cook County) forest preserve," says Kim. "There was always a free grill, which was important for us."
He made friends with other recent immigrants, including an Italian boy named Tony Bruno, who helped him realize that different cultures also had surprising connections, as he relates in the book: "Tony's family was as Italian as mine was Korean, but there were some similarities. ... Tony's family had a garden like ours, but they grew tomatoes. Instead of drying fish on a clothesline, they would dry, salt and cure their tomatoes in wicker baskets under the sun."
He'd later explore those cultural similarities when he decided to become a chef. For example, Kim's soy balsamic sauce is a staple of his kitchens, and while combining soy sauce and balsamic vinegar sounds unexpected, it makes perfect sense to him. "My mom always made a soy and vinegar sauce," says Kim. "But why can't we add the subdued deep, rich flavor of balsamic vinegar? It helps mellow the soy sauce out."
Of course, Kim didn't immediately start out cooking this kind of food. Instead, he immersed himself in what he thought all great chefs had to learn: French food. So he got a culinary degree at Kendall College in Chicago and worked under some of the best French chefs in the country, including Pierre Pollin at Le Titi de Paris in Arlington Heights and Jean Banchet at Ciboulette in Atlanta. He eventually landed a job as chef de cuisine at Charlie Trotter's, the most acclaimed restaurant in Chicago at the time.
But he was restless to cook food that was personal to him: "I wanted to cook food that reflected my heritage of Korea and Chicago, of kimchi and hot dogs." That led to opening Urban Belly in 2008 with his Puerto Rican wife, Yvonne Cadiz, whom he'd met at Charlie Trotter's. (Their marriage also explains his Korican sauce, which he learned from his mother-in-law, Dolores Alicea.) Eventually, he also opened Belly Shack and BellyQ, though the former sadly closed in 2016.
Considering his fine-dining pedigree and globe-trotting style, you'd think the book would require half of Whole Foods to cook all the dishes. But instead of recipes with dozens of hard-to-track-down ingredients, the book is based on a compact collection of "Master Sauces and Seasonings," which can be used throughout the book. Kim got the idea of structuring this book from his fine-dining experience. "In traditional French cooking, it's embedded into your head that there are five mother sauces," says Kim. "In Asian food, there are foundational cooking techniques, but I wanted accessibility."
Whip up a batch of lemongrass chile sauce, and you're halfway to making nine different recipes in the book. Nouc cham sauce, which takes all of five minutes to put together, pops up in 22 recipes. (If you wanted further proof of just how un-Korean this book is, the lemongrass chile sauce is based on Kim's visit to Thailand, while nuoc cham is a staple in Vietnam.)
That's a lot to throw in a book ostensibly about Korean barbecue. But if that's what it took to get Bill Kim's story and astonishingly original recipes in a book, then it's all worth it. Plus, putting the book together helped his own family reconnect.
"My parents and I grew apart over the years, as I moved around," says Kim. "But this year, we've been meeting up. I'm actually organizing a barbecue this summer where we are going to reserve the same grill at the forest preserve from when I was a kid. I can't wait."
