722: What Eric Kim Really Thinks About Food52

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0:31it was sort of this place where creativity wasn't that rewarded if you were like a little different or maybe like good like they really hated you and i think that place didn't encourage innovation in in the aesthetics in the everything and so it was this weird cookie cutter thing This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

0:59Eric Kim is a writer and columnist at the New York Times and working on some really exciting new projects. Eric is truly one of my favorite guests, and we go over many topics of the day, including some of his latest writing, what he's cooking, and where he's been dining out. We also talk about his essay collection, Spaghetti Junction, which will be released next year. I always love speaking with Eric, and I hope you enjoy this episode.

1:28Eric Kim, welcome back to This Is Taste. It's so great to see you, man. Thanks for having me. Happy New Year. Happy New Year, buddy. I think this is your sixth time on. Yeah, I think it is. Yeah. There were two episodes where we did live, and then four solo. For Solo, and you're always welcome back. And I just think there's always so much going on in your world with your career and your writing, but just like catching up. It's good to catch up. And there's just so much that happens in a year. I've really enjoyed having this interview be sort of like a marker of the time passing. Time passing. I appreciate the space to share things.

2:02So I think we're going to talk about writing, the New York Times, your work there. We'll talk a little bit about Food52, New York Times pizza interview. Curious about your thought. I thought it was a fun little thing they were doing there. But, okay, I have to ask you, you spent some time in Atlanta recently, your hometown. You're in New York. What have been some restaurant meals you've been excited about? Yeah. Well, actually, last night I had dinner at Anton's. And usually that restaurant, I'm sitting at the bar in the corner with my laptop writing, with like a Manhattan usually. But I had a friend coming into town.

2:36and I realized that this friend, it's someone I used to work with at Food52 and then we just became really close friends after that. She's speaking at my wedding. I kind of, her name's Katie, by the way. I realized that every time she comes to New York, I pick a restaurant that is really important to me. And so as I was going through the list, I was like, wow, I've really shown her all the best ones. But I hadn't taken her to Anton's and she's sort of, I think it's okay to say, but she's sort of pregnant now. So I kind of wanted to feed her like, you know, I call it everyday food, real food. But that sounds like, I don't know.

3:13There's just something about Anton's. They do mashed potatoes, obviously, really well. We talked about that before. Their spinach is good. We got a roast chicken. I don't know. I just, it was an amazing meal. It was so, I don't know how to explain it. It's like, it's just a dinner that's regular. It's not going to sit in your stomach for days. You say everyday food. I think you mean, I'm interpreting it as, it's just not chefy food. It's just not like restaurant, like three twists and a turn. What I was going to say was it's sort of like when a chef is cooking at home maybe. Yeah, totally. That's the vibe.

3:46And it's so comforting. And the vegetables taste like vegetables. They sit in your stomach okay. And they also have this anchovy pasta that's really good. It's like a creamy. Anyway, it was nice to show her that place because it's one of my favorites. My West Village friends love that place. It's definitely like a neighborhood restaurant. It's a neighborhood restaurant. People go to with lots of frequency. Exactly. But yes, we did just come back from Atlanta. I was there for a month and a half, sort of like healing. I think I was in a cocoon. I was like healing from the year. It was a really rough year.

4:16But after that, I did go to a couple of restaurants in Atlanta. There's a spot called Shoya that my dad likes to go with, you know, one of his guy friends. And they just get a bottle of sake, hot sake each. And then they get some sushi and some yakitori, some izakaya bites. I like that place. That place is good. When people ask me about Atlanta, it's really tough because my perspective on Atlanta is it's not downtown or midtown. It's like before the big highway, the big like Spaghetti Junction, which is the Tom Moreland interchange. It's where the suburbs kind of are. But that's sort of where a lot of the immigrant food is, the Korean food.

4:53There's a place called Cheongdam or Cheongdam. Crap. It's one of those. It's in Duluth, but it's a Korean barbecue spot. And I took my partner's family there. And we're getting married this year. So it was sort of like one of those meetings of the family. They've met before. But it was in your home turf. It was in our home turf. And my parents were really anxious. They were like, you know, these parents are German and Ecuadorian. And so they were like, can they eat this food? Like, are they able to? And I was like, they're a little more traveled than we are even. So I think it's fine. And they loved it.

5:26My future mother-in-law was kind of obsessed with the vegetables. And it was fun to share Korean barbecue with them. I'm sort of in this Korean food phase again because I've just really, I don't know, my history nerd side is sort of coming out and every time I eat at a Korean restaurant that has those metal plates and if I'm doing Korean barbecue or stew or whatever or all the banchan, I'm thinking about like, wow, this has come a long way. The kings have been eating like this for a long, you know. It's a point I want to talk to you about because I think that after Korean American came out and you've written extensively about Korean cuisine and culture, you needed a break.

6:05Yeah, kind of. And like, but we've been texting about this over time, how you're kind of like getting back into Korean food, which is kind of crazy to think about, but I totally recognize what you're saying. And is it like the New York City restaurant boom that we're in the middle of? Is it home cooking online? That's a part of it. What's inspiring this kind of getting back into it? Yeah, that's a part of it. But it's also, there's just so much I didn't get to address in the book. And so in the New York Times and my columns, that's usually when once or twice a year I do a big Korean column. And I get to just obsess over one thing and learn about it.

6:41Like right now, my February column, for instance, is going to be about chon, which is a really interesting category of food that I never cared about until randomly in my early 30s. No way. I sort of clocked. I was like, oh, that's a really important thing that I grew up with that I never appreciated until now. So, like, we know, we meaning the population, Pajan, right? Yeah, Pajan. But there's chan. There's a lot, yeah. The whole gamut of chan. Yeah, chan refers to a specific type of cooking style, actually. It refers to the dish, but also a category of fritters. And often it's any vegetable, any meat, anything dipped in flour first and then egg or starch and egg and then pan fried in oil.

7:26And the one that's really popular is pajeon, sometimes called hamul pajeon because there's seafood in there. And that's like the big pancake. And it's just, you know, I think people simplify it as savory pancakes. But I think I realized that there are all kinds of cheons. And one thing that's special about it is it's a way to cook a very seasonal ingredient and a local ingredient like a vegetable. One of my favorite chans, for instance, is perla john. Oh, yeah. Like really specific. You put a little bit of meat mixture in there, fold it, and then you dip that in flour and egg and pan fry. And it's sort of, I don't know, the pan fry, it's a way to cook that thing only the amount of time it needs to be cooked, right?

8:12and so you really get this nice flavor and the comfort of just anything that's fried in oil I think of there's like potato chon which is potato pancakes and it's essentially it reminds me of latkes it reminds me of any kind of culture that celebrates little bites of pan fried food I want to take you to this place in Seoul in Hanam, kind of near Itaewon and we covered it in Korea World briefly but they do a shrimp which is mostly egg. It's basically all egg with a little bit of shrimp. I love this category. And that combo of the flour and the egg coating and frying it, it's not tempura shrimp. It's this I don't want to say gooey but it's this really comforting softness on the outside of the egg.

9:01It's almost like what's that? Velveting? It does something to the shrimp and I love with Sean, hey, what's your relationship to Korean food after all these years? Like you wrote two Korean cookbooks now. Wow, Eric, flipping the script. I love it. I'd be curious to know. I mean, my relationship is always evolving. I mean, I honestly, right now I'm kind of getting back into restaurants in New York because I took some time off last year just doing the podcast and a lot of travel. And I mean, I'm ashamed to say like I went to L.A. twice and didn't even have Korean food. so maybe we're like aligned that I feel like for me like Korean food is it's like not even in the middle innings right now even though like the popular narrative would be to say that oh it's you know the boom is happening gone that's so incorrect so my relationship is good I don't have a book signed up Dookie and I will probably do a book in like 8 years we went to Samu Jung for the first time.

10:03Have you been to the bulgogi place? No. So that just reminds me that, like, it's on 31st, right by the Garden. It's this restaurant group that started in Seoul in 1963. Nice. And they do, like, the hand-cut bulgogi, like, the griddled style that you find throughout Seoul. To me, rediscovering places like that. But then you've got, like, places like Jua as well, operating at the highest level. Yeah, that's my... There's so many restaurants. Like, I'm such a creature of habit and really bad at, I don't think I'd be a great restaurant critic because when I find my spot, I stay there. And Ole is sort of my go-to.

10:41That's your place. For Korean food. Because the seasoning is like the way my mom does it. And I've talked about it a lot. Ole is, as you should, like stand by your people. This episode is brought to you by Hungry Root. If you listen to the show, you may know that I'm a major fan of Hungry Root. I've been a paid, yes, paid subscriber of Hungry Root since 2018 and have had the company's founder, Ben McKean, sit in the studio for a conversation. The reason I love Hungry Root is simple. When I'm in a pinch for time to make an interesting and delicious lunch or dinner, Hungry Root always has my back.

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13:19So you've got Spaghetti Junction, which has been announced as your essay collection that's coming out next year. how are you feeling with getting through these essays and and really kind of i know we're about a year out but you're probably pretty close to wrapping this thing yeah it's exciting i have them all in my phone so if anyone wants to hack me and i listen to them on the train to like edit them and i'm in that stage of the process i used to do this with music with like yeah i used to like record albums and stuff um but as you're listening to as i listen to the words i'm at that really fun part of the editing process where now I'm editing for sound.

13:55And it's, I don't know, when you get to do that, if you have the luxury to do that, and they've given me plenty of time to write this. And I've been working on it since, you know, the day Korean American came out. It's been like four years coming now. And it feels good to get to the core of the essays. This is the hardest thing I've ever done. And I'm almost hesitant to talk about it because there's always this chance that, like, I won't finish it or it won't come out. That's my anxiety, but it'll be great. But I think I've come to this place where I realized that annoyingly I had to go through a lot of therapy and I had to really process some dynamics I had in my life with my family, my friends, my partner, even my dog.

14:39And it's a collection of essays about the most life-changing moments in my 20s. And I think the 20s, early 30s are when a lot of people are trying to figure out who they are and I just realized how much I didn't know who I was and I had I was just so depressed you know and I thought that was just a part of my reality but once I kind of did the work and I had a lot of help from people and I was talking to my agent Kitty yesterday about how this is the hardest thing I've ever done and it's so sad and the next project doesn't have to be so hard and sad but it's also a celebration because good getting to the end of these essays it's it's this annoying thing when you write a collection of essays or a memoir about a specific period of your life you have to finish the story in real life in order to finish the essay yeah and i i you know i had a lot of plot in the essays for many years but i didn't have the analysis or the the final moment where i'm like oh i've i've resolved this tension and now i understand it and here's the the crux of why i wrote it and what i want to present that's so special eric that you've come to that conclusion with your personal life, but also just with your writing career, and you're able to have this collection that I just can't wait to read.

15:53I think I'll probably have a little earlier look because I'm publishing here at Crown, but it's next year that's coming out. Next year, yeah. And I'm just, it's one of those things, it's a book about just finally realizing how the world works, how things work, and I think in my, I came to New York at 18 years old with a guitar in my hand, and I was so innocent and so sheltered and so repressed. And I think over the years, New York really helped me to grow into the creative I am, but it also really beat me down a lot. And I think I realized that I had to sort of find that old confidence again, but also obviously grow from it.

16:37And that's the annoying part. I had this crazy work week last week. Just all these jobs happened at once. It's actually the week that got me out of bed because, you know, the holidays, I was able to just be comatose for the first time in a really long time. Watching some Netflix. A lot of Netflix, a lot of just, you know, messing around and working on the essays at night. But it was nice to be jolted out of bed and realizing, oh, it's January 7th. I need to get out of bed. And not just that, having that busy work week, and it was the hardest week I've ever had in my life professionally, getting through it, realizing why I was afraid to do, you know, that video shoot or that writing assignment or whatever.

17:19I felt myself stretching for the first time in a long time. And as a creative, if you don't stretch, you sort of die a little inside. And I was sort of dying very slowly for the last couple of years. And now I'm okay. Eric, it's nice to hear that. You mentioned how the world works, and I want to segue because I think we haven't really talked about this on the show. I've written about it, and I've been quoted in a couple places. People have reached out. AI and recipes. I want to get your take about AI affecting food media and recipes and really, like, how do you see AI, you know, working with recipe creation with possibly replacing publishers?

17:59That's something that I've been kind of talking a lot about. perhaps yes, perhaps no. I'd like to get your take first. I have a few thoughts as well. Yeah, replacing publishers. That's just interesting because I think of it as like replacing the artists, the creatives. And because I think people don't understand yet or still that recipe developers are artists and they're individual creators. And my hope is that people seeing the way AI, the limits of an AI recipe, I hope they can see where the nuance can come in when a human hand comes in. And I think people still don't necessarily value the labor of a culinary creative.

18:45I think as a recipe developer, I'm reading all kinds of comments online, and I think there is a growing segment of very avid fans who understand that my recipes are very different from Mally Slagle's recipes. is very different from, you know, Jesse Shefchick or Kendra Vakulin, whatever. Samin Nosrat, Solo, I just want to like name her. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My friends. I think we've all been in the podcast except for Kendra. Oh, Kendra. Come on, Kendra. Yeah, Kendra has a cookbook coming out next year. Come on, Kendra. Yeah, we're going to be touring together for sure. Nice. I bet. Well, I think my point is just that I'm over here.

19:17I was just listening to a podcast episode of Sounds Like a Cult. I love this podcast. So cool. They analyze the world in this sociological, psychological way that I do. but they put it into much smarter words because they're really intelligent women. But they have an episode about ChatGPT. And I think, sorry, this is my way of saying, I hope it's starting a conversation for people to understand what they're losing by relying on a robot to take these creative jobs. It's sort of something that is a conversation happening in my own circles. And it's been happening for the last couple of years. I think a lot of professional recipe developers, which is very different from a professional chef or a professional whatever, professional recipe developers, people like Yassi or Effie, if we let AI kind of, you know, decide cake recipes for us, we're not going to get that beautiful crumb that only Yassi or Effie can do.

20:20That's a really specific example of it. I love it. I've been noticing that I have a lot of these kind of big sister figures in food media who have been doing this for so long. And I'm watching them, not Yossi in particular, but I'm watching a lot of them feel left behind or something. And I feel kind of like left behind sometimes because I'm not really one of those TikTok influencers. And, you know, there's obviously space for them. But I think we need to not like replace the good stuff that we already had. And then the professionals who know how to not just bake great cakes, et cetera, but also how to write the recipe to make that make that happen.

20:59And I don't know. I, AI, AI is a language tool to me. I have to say that sometimes I'll Google myself and Google will automatically do the AI, you know, result as the first thing. And sometimes I'll be like, wow, they really. Gemini knows me. They really get me. Yeah, they understand. I understand. But for the most part, there's so many errors in those answers. That's what I'm thinking too. I think I'll share that AI is certainly being used by recipe developers as a tool. AI is not going to replace recipes. And I think people who are like, I'm going to use AI to put in like the eight things in my fridge to make a recipe.

21:41They're going to have like really, I would say, mixed results. and that there's a reason there are artists and professional developers out there. I think the media side is a different thing, and I think a lot of media is going to be kind of in a bad spot with SEO kind of going away, with basically AI pulling from published recipes to make a new recipe. How do you feel about that, having your work pulled by AI to create a version of maybe your Tenjun Chigae and Korean American? You know, and I think I'm supposed to say that I'm pretty annoyed, but I just like. Say whatever you want. But I have this real, it's almost like an unfounded confidence or like a cockiness about just people's hands to cook things differently.

22:30Yeah. Right now I'm like, I've been studying across all my Korean cookbooks, different chon dipping sauces and everyone's ratios are so different. Yeah. And so even if AI were to cull everything or pull from my recipe, it can account for taste. And, you know, my dipping sauces are going to probably be a little more soy sauce heavy, less acidic, you know, less sweet maybe. I don't know. One thing about AI is I think it kind of makes people even lazier than they already are. I think my mantra this year to combat AI is to keep emphasizing this message that cooking is a craft. It's an art. Recipe development is a type of writing that's also a craft.

23:17Technical writing is a craft. I hope people see that the art of this stuff is why it's so joyful and why there's so much delight when you eat a new bite of food that you've never made before. Or that delight is, you're not going to really get that if you're using AI. And I don't know, even just knowing that this transcript is going to go through some AI machine. Yeah, it will be analyzed and our conversation about AI will then be generated for bullet points about our thoughts on AI. It's a wild thought. And it'll be pretty accurate. It'll be fine. We can't answer this question today, but I think we'll keep coming back to it on our show.

23:55I think we should talk about Food 52. You work there. You wrote a column there. You, in some ways, began your career there, though I know you worked at Food Network as well. But I think you became a figure in food media at Food52. This is on the heels of the news that Food52 was basically disbanded and went into bankruptcy. Thankfully, the folks at America's Test Kitchen have stepped in at least for a bit as of this recording to take over. I think they're still working those details out and they'll be reported. So maybe the brand will live on. But Eric, like lots of thoughts. I know you worked there for years and you shared a lot of friendships with folks there.

24:35What are you feeling about Food52 right now? Yeah. What a great opportunity. I've held a lot of this in for a long time because I've still been processing it and I think I now that the book is sort of like you know finishing up I sort of understand the role of that place in my life a little better and I know what I want to say about it which is it was a very unique place I think it's where I had a playground to sort of practice being a food writer before I became a food writer if that's okay to say. And I think that gratitude for that time in my life, it sort of came back once I got rid of the negative feelings.

25:21And the negative feelings just come from how tumultuous that place was. And I think any millennial workplace was sort of like that. It was a startup. So I had just come from the Food Network, which was so much more organized. and I had beautiful colleagues who were much older than me and they really took care of me in this like, you know, mentory way. Whereas at Foo52, everyone was in their 20s. Everyone was competing for Scarce Resources. It was, you know, the cool place to be. And, but it was very, it was pretty traumatizing. And all my friends, Ella Quintner is one. She has a cookbook coming out soon.

26:00That friend Katie that I took out to dinner, she was the editor under me who I watched get laid off. I was laid off myself. But getting laid off from there basically brought me into the arms of Emily Weinstein, who was excited to bring me on right after that. Yeah, that's the editor of New York Times Cooking and New York Times longtime food editor. I mean, Ella's interview that we had, this conversation around her book, I loved that conversation with Ella. Yeah, listen to that episode. So great to chat with her. I think she was saying that basically everyone at Food52 thought they were going to get laid off at all times.

26:34Which they were. which is true she said people would just go to the ninth floor and yeah you'd never see him again what's that like working there so okay so every every quarter there's an announcement that they've laid someone like laid off a quarter of their staff or half of their staff and those links get passed around and i'm always like is this from last quarter or this quarter like every quarter they're they laid off about 30 of their staff and um and people would always be like oh that's so sad and I just really think it was run by people who didn't know business so um and and I and when I was listening to Ella's episode though I was I was so touched I was kind of like oh I never I never thought about it that way the way she talked about it was with a little fondness and with with kind of like this um more of a a third person perspective I think and um once I was able to do that with my time there because for so long I was so angry that they laid me off I was like who do they think they are and um and I had a lot of demons um to deal with but now that I've sort of processed a lot of um dynamics that happen in workplaces like that um it was a lot of jealousy I think it was a lot of people competing for resources so when good things would happen to me which kind of happened a lot um I grew a fan base so did Ella people like us who had voices were celebrated and but we were we were the ones I won't speak for Ella but I felt that I was constantly being uh tamped down um told to like be quiet and um and and and that's sort of just this dynamic in life it's a it happens in every workplace it happens all the time and now that I understand that I it's not even that I forgive my colleagues there are people who work there it's more I see the the truth which is that place was just such a pressure cooker for um not just I call it a talent and terror incubator it was it was like a horrible place to work but it was also a place where you walk in at like I don't know 10 30 a.m after sleeping in and then you just get to like edit food essays and and you know write recipes and you get to go home and cook and but they were 80 hour weeks they were um I was pushing myself a lot because I I had just failed another industry which was academia I had failed an exam you know as a 20 something and I was trying out this new outfit, which was food media.