Chef profile: Min Kim

Min Kim’s traditional Japanese training and the strenuous hours of his early career undoubtedly shaped his skill and determination. But it was his teenage years at a school in the Victorian country town of Warrnambool that fuelled his independence and honed this talented chef’s ambition.

Korean-born Kim was headhunted by the Urban Purveyor Group for its high-profile Sake Restaurant in Sydney’s Double Bay at the start of the year. In his role as executive chef Kim employs traditional techniques and contemporary creativity.

His tuna tataki with leek sumi and pickled asparagus is a dish of devotion. Kim employs a classic seven-to-eight-day ageing technique which softens the tuna muscle and intensifies its flavour. He chargrills the leek component for 24 hours then blends it into a fine ashen powder that adds earthiness and bitterness. The asparagus is flash-pickled in a zesty mix of white soy and lime juice just before serving.

Kim’s journey to this innovative style of cuisine, and to Sake Restaurant, began at the elbow of his uncompromising father, a Korean chef proudly trained in Japan. “My father didn’t want me to become a professional chef, he considered it to be a low-profile, low-paying occupation. He wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer,” says Kim. “So when I was thirteen he sent me to the other side of the world to live with a family friend and go to secondary school in Australia.”

Undeterred in his dream to become a chef Kim returned and worked in his father’s restaurant until he was deemed “ready” to train in Japan. There he observed the masters, working up to 100 hours a week in three-Michelin starred Narisawa and Ryugin restaurants in Tokyo. But the fire sparked by his time in Australia at the beginning of the burgeoning MasterChef movement convinced him this was the land of opportunity.

So Kim returned with his kitbag of Korean and Japanese skills and found work at Tetsuya’s, adding intricate French techniques to his repertoire. He joined Sokyo in Sydney’s Pyrmont in October 2011 working with its innovative head chef Chase Kojima for three years.

At Sake, Kim employs the Japanese tradition of iki jime, or brain spiking of live fish, which provides a rapid and humane death and creates tender sashimi; he uses a centuries’ old specialised method of slow-cooking skewers on the custom-made robata charcoal grill, and he adds the French flourishes he learned at the hand of Tetsuya to stamp his signature on the menu.

Kim’s wagyu toban yaki, a hot-pot dish of watercress, onion, highly marbled wagyu and Japanese rice wine vinegar, is enlivened by a bright apple and ginger sauce and finessed with shavings of black truffle. It’s a fusion-style masterpiece.

But his father’s tough love, designed to keep him humble remains today and despite his success Kim still receives comments such as: “It’s the same boiling water that hardens the egg and softens the potato. Which one are you: the potato or the egg?”

This young chef, at the pinnacle of his career with the best experiences of the east and the west on his resume, can hold his head high and answer “both”.