Wine & Cuisine with Jeannie Cho Lee & Chef Brian Kim

0:00Jeannie Cho Lee:In the pairing of Asian cuisine and wine, what you have to understand is how does that type of wine with that structure, that level of acidity, tannins, body, alcohol, how does it impact the condiments, the seasonings, the dishes, the main ingredients that goes into the dish?

0:22Chef Brian Kim:Today, from our New York City headquarters, we're joined by two guests who have dedicated their lives to the world of wine and cuisine. Master of wine, Jeannie Shoo Lee, is an author, professor, and consultant to wonderful projects all around the world. Joining her is chef Brian Kim, founder of OEG Hospitality, and chef-owner of Michelin-starred restaurants OEG Me and BOM in New York City. The two have known each other for more than 10 years, and in this conversation, they explore the delicate alchemy of Asian food and wine, the art of creating a full fine dining experience, and what it really means to eat and drink beautifully today.

1:00Chef Brian Kim:So settle in, pour yourself something you love, and join us in the Culture Lounge.

1:05Jeannie Cho Lee:I've been a huge fan ever since the time we met because I didn't know you had this restaurant. And as soon as I heard, I think even maybe several months later, I went to your restaurant with my daughters.

1:16Chef Brian Kim:Yeah, yeah, yeah. You always brought your daughters. Yes, yes.

1:19Jeannie Cho Lee:We have four daughters who live in New York City. and I think we've tried every single item on your menu from the time you open even until now so I've been a regular customer for many years.

1:31Chef Brian Kim:I appreciate it.

1:34Jeannie Cho Lee:So I remember meeting Brian at a wine dinner. I was a speaker I think but it was a small gathering of maybe between 20 to 30 wine lovers in Seoul, Korea and I think your cousin was there as well.

1:50Chef Brian Kim:Oh my god, I just, I remember. Now you remember. And the last 10 years, I think, together with the K-food, K-cuisine, K-dining scene, I've seen wine rising at the same time. I believe Korean, along with other Korean culture, I believe that Korean food is not emerging. It's getting to mainstream. It's really, really popular.

2:18Jeannie Cho Lee:Yes, yes. Even in Paris, where I spend quite a bit of time as well, every other block in the major arrondissement in Paris, you see a Korean grocery store or a Korean restaurant. And before, it used to be more Japanese. And they're all converting. And I met with the president of the Korean Restaurant Association in Paris. And he said they created the association purely because they believe that there are thousands of restaurants calling themselves Korean restaurants, but they're not really Korean. They're run by Chinese. That's true. So just because they want to ride the wave and popularity. So for lots of people who don't or they're becoming more familiar with Korean cuisine but don't really know it well, how would you summarize what's unique about Korean flavors, Korean cooking, Korean cuisine in general that's different from Japanese or Chinese or, you know, Thai?

3:25Chef Brian Kim:I think there's a lot of unique characteristics, but I think most unique thing is like fermentation. A lot of fermentation, kimchi, like we have like hundreds types of kimchi. Every single home has a different flavor of kimchi. Fermentation is a science, but at the same time, it's really tricky depending on the environment, the temperature, how much we salt it. A flavor always comes differently. So that's a kind of really interesting point of Korean cuisine.

3:58Jeannie Cho Lee:When you decided you were going to study cuisine seriously, was there a dish or a meal or an experience that inspired you?

4:09Chef Brian Kim:Honestly, at the time, I didn't mean to be a chef. So I never thought about I'm going to be a chef. But when I discussed with my parents that, oh, I want to do hospitality business. But, you know, in Korea, it's unlike America. The parents really involve, you know, their son and daughters like Korea. And they were very, you know, opposed to, you know, they didn't like my goal. Because at the time, the chef or restaurant owner was not that respected.

4:47Chef Brian Kim:So, I majored business administration in Korea, in university. And then after college, I worked in the global company, overseas marketing and sales, to learn about the business, organization, marketing. In the meanwhile, as a side job, I put some money with my friends. We opened a restaurant, so it was really, really successful at the beginning. We had a conflict with the chef, and then after chef left, somehow the business went down. That's when I decided that, oh, if I want to do restaurant business, I have to learn cooking. I gradually started working on the weekend as a part of the job in the kitchen.

5:30Chef Brian Kim:And then after I'm ready to jump on the next step, I came to New York to go to a culinary school. So actually CIA is more like French based. So I wanted to learn that. And after graduation, I worked in some restaurant, mostly in Belay, Chef Dave Belay, who was a legendary chef. But unfortunately, he passed away. So after that, I decided to open a small restaurant in East Village.

6:02Jeannie Cho Lee:Which happened too many times.

6:04Chef Brian Kim:Yeah, yeah. It was like 10, 11 years ago. At the time, I was so scared. And then somehow, like...

6:13Jeannie Cho Lee:It was very successful.

6:14Chef Brian Kim:Yeah, six months later, opening, suddenly major critics like Ryan Sutton, From Eater, like Pete Wells, Adam Platform, like New Magazine. They all like picked up our restaurant and then gave us a great review. It was this, and then it was exploding, you know. I was like, I was happy. It was so busy. Like I work like 20 hours a day. Oh, my God. I think that was the moment I was really excited in my life. So, Jeannie, you became the first Asian master of wine. How did you get into wine? When was the moment that you decided you wanted to do this?

7:02Jeannie Cho Lee:You know, I have a very similar story to you, Chef, because I think you can imagine Korean parents, If you tell them that you want to go into a wine or restaurant or hospitality, this is not something that they would approve of. And the first thing my father said to me was, well, I don't know what a master of wine is, but it sounds like it's a master's degree. But you already have one. Why do you need another one? You're not even using the first one that you have. And what are you going to do with the master of wine? Are you going to be, if you do achieve that, are you going to be selling wine?

7:38Jeannie Cho Lee:Are you going to be in the commercial side of the business? And I said, no, I don't want to sell wine. I'm not interested in selling wine. And then my father said, you're not going to be serving wine, are you? That would be totally inappropriate for my daughter to be serving other people wine. And I said, no, I don't want to be a sommelier. I've never been a sommelier. But I would like to educate. I would like to communicate and teach people. I'm interested in sharing the joy, the knowledge, the entire world of wine with people who appreciate food and flavor. Because I do think that food and wine, both as different universes of flavor, goes very well together.

8:26Jeannie Cho Lee:And that is when there wasn't one moment, but I spent a year when I was 19 in England. And this was back in the late 80s when England didn't have the kind of dining scene it does now. And the food was pretty awful, I have to say. And my mother, being such an amazing home Korean cook, made amazing dishes for me every day. So then being alone in England with terrible food every day, the only thing that saved me actually was wine. Because with wine, there was flavor. There was a whole spectrum of interesting new flavors that I was able to experience and learn about. But in the food, it was bland.

9:26Jeannie Cho Lee:It was overcooked. It was mushy. The texture I didn't enjoy. But I focused on wine then because it helped me to eat the food.

9:36Chef Brian Kim:Okay.

9:37Jeannie Cho Lee:So I think that was really the defining year for me where I realized that wine is a universe of flavors that I can really appreciate. And especially when the food flavors are lacking, it really brings something. And it was, you know, later on as I progressed that I learned more how you put strong flavors in food with strong flavors in wine together.

10:05Chef Brian Kim:That's very interesting. I personally, I was always curious because as a chef, if I cook, if it becomes my work as a business, sometimes I want to stay away from the cooking. Sometimes I feel really exhausted. But do you have that kind of like experience? Like you find some limit of your like improving your knowledge or the wine is really like complicated and you know.

10:32Jeannie Cho Lee:Never-ending. Yeah, of course. Yeah, never ending to the point where even as a master of wine, I'm not sure I've really mastered it. I'm mastering wine is probably the more correct term because you're always learning. And to your question about whether it becomes too much or whether there is a limit, for example, for Singapore Airlines, where I've been selecting and consulting for them for 18 years, every five months or so, five to six months, I go to Singapore. And every day for a week, I taste more than 100 different wines, blind, to evaluate and to see which wines we're going to be choosing for the next selection.

11:15Jeannie Cho Lee:And after 100 wines, you know, you're tired physically. Of course, of course. Yeah. And I suppose at the end of the day, the question is, do you still want to drink wine or would you rather just have water or beer? I still choose wine.

11:36Chef Brian Kim:Oh, really? That's amazing. Yes, yes.

11:38Jeannie Cho Lee:I still want to have a glass of wine that I don't have to analyze, but I can appreciate it because it's still balanced and beautiful and it offers, you know, flavors that just bring me pleasure. That's really great. Yeah, it's a matter of getting back to, you know, what brought you in in the first place. So when I was studying for the Master of Wine, which is a very intense process during the five years, there was a point where I felt I'm, this is too much. I'm being overwhelmed. My whole life is focused on wine, wine, wine, and this is not the most important thing in life. But what kept bringing me back was the fact that I went into it because there is the history, the culture, the food element that brings wine into the world of what's relevant to me and what makes me happy.

12:46Jeannie Cho Lee:and so when I finished the first thing I did when I finished my achieved the Master of Wine title was that I said I'm going back into food because I went to Cordon Bleu as well and I loved food first before wine and I was brought into wine because of food and so the first book I wrote was Asian Palette which is about pairing 10 different Asian cuisines with wine. And I wanted to go more deeply into food because I thought I'm becoming too specialized in wine and I want to balance it out by what my first love was, which was food. So it was a way for me to balance things back. And I always think of the two together.

13:43Jeannie Cho Lee:What are the things that inspire you to, you know, create a new dish? I mean, of course, based on authentic Korean flavors, but how do you get inspired?

13:54Chef Brian Kim:So me and our team has a too strong philosophy when we do the R &D that we never compromise. We should have a core authentic flavor, Korean flavor, traditional flavor. Second is we want to serve creative dish. So traditional or authentic and then creative is kind of conflict. Yeah, yeah. So it's our menu R &D process really, really tough. Talking about the creativity, we don't want to serve the food that you can make at home. If you go to a restaurant, you want to find something new. And also, business perspective, we should have a different food from other restaurants. So we start with the traditional Korean menu.

14:54Chef Brian Kim:And then next, how we can add creativity into it. So that's from, like, international cuisine. It could be technique, flavor, ingredient, or serving style. Well, we get our inspiration from everywhere. But we don't want to be too overwhelmed by other international cuisine. We want to keep the core Korean flavor, but use international cuisine, utilize international cuisine as an accent. That's the process. Many dishes in our current restaurant, oijime and bom, that's actually my mother's recipe and what she made for me. and then I kind of refined it. At that time, I didn't know it was special. I didn't thought our mother's food was good because I always ate at home.

15:44Chef Brian Kim:But when I visited, I was invited to my friend. I was surprised. The food is so bland. It's not good. And I went to another friend's house. It was the same. So I realized that, oh, my mother is an incredible cook. So I really appreciate my mother. And one of the most popular dish at home, the crab egg custard dish. In the bottom, there's a Japanese-style chaomushi for the silky texture. In the middle, we make a soup with a Korean anchovy dashi. That's mainly for Korean flavor. We use a dubanjang, like Chinese accent. on the top we use like a like a egg white like a like a French meringue and then we soak in the broth and it has like a bubbly silky texture it has a like French Japanese Chinese Korean everything there and then that's what my mother made for me and I refined it so I'm getting hungry already so so my When my mother visits the restaurant, she doesn't visit often because she lives in Korea.

16:59Chef Brian Kim:And then maybe two years ago, that was the first time she visited my restaurant. I was so scared and I was so nervous. I mean, yeah, I was so nervous. She's more trickier than a missionary inspector. So generally, the food and wine pairing is really important. And when did you get involved and interested in pairing with the food and wine?

17:30Jeannie Cho Lee:All my life. Because I'm eating and drinking at home. I think everything, as you said, starts at home. It's what your mother taught you in terms of international flavors and global flavors and appreciating food. and pairing wine I did because as soon as I came back and really started appreciating from the UK and I found a new appreciation for wine, I started bringing it into the dining table. I would choose different wines. But I guess the more professional and the more structured way of approaching food and wine pairing, especially with Asian cuisine, really starts with the very, very basics.

18:17Korean food in general, Chinese food is actually exactly the same

18:22Jeannie Cho Lee:in many Asian cuisine dishes, is a very communal experience. All the dishes come out at once. And the idea of a pairing is that, well, you have 10 dishes and maybe, you know, six, seven banchan condiments and other side dishes. How do you have one wine that can pair with all these different flavors? It's impossible. And I don't even recommend it. So what I do with communal setting and a very casual restaurant is that I ask the chef or the restaurant to bring out dishes in groups. So bring out all the lighter, pan-fried, maybe more vegetable ingredient dishes in the beginning. You can bring them out five or six at a time.

19:12Jeannie Cho Lee:It's okay. But in that setting, you need to group the flavors so that you can then choose a bottle of wine or something that is appropriate for that flavor group. So this is one way of overcoming the communal setting of most Asian meals. Now, the other way was, you know, as you have your five-course menu, which is very classic. Progressive. Yeah. It's really important. Is to do one dish at a time, which is the Western concept. And it's easier because if it's only one dish, even if it has, let's say, five, six, seven different flavors on that dish, you can still try to find a wine that will pair with that dish.