“My passion is not cooking,” says Dae Kim. Every night, Kim returns home from preparing 12-course tasting menus at Nōksu, in Manhattan, to an apartment with no stovetop, no pots, and no silverware. “I hate cooking at home.” And yet, at 29 years old, he is an alum of Thomas Keller’s three-Michelin-starred Per Se. Since Nōksu opened, in October, he’s been the head chef of the Korean-inspired fine-dining restaurant, which is located in the 34th Street–Herald Square subway station.
When Kim moved from Seoul to Chicago at the age of 14, he dreamed of becoming a motorcyclist. He lived with his aunt and uncle, and did not fit the high-school mold. “I had a lot of trouble back then,” he admits. Frustrated by academics and uncertain about his future, Kim found refuge in the kitchen. He started cooking by accident, while working as a dishwasher and laundry boy at Ria, a restaurant in Chicago’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. “I didn’t fall in love. I just did it because I felt like I was valuable,” says Kim. Later, he became a line cook to earn some extra money. Ria was not a bad place to start—before closing, in 2012, it had two Michelin stars.
“I liked the environment, that intensity. It was definitely toxic, harsh, really harsh,” Kim tells me. “When you’re young, you have no plan in life. You see a chef who is focusing on one thing, one dish … It kind of inspires you.”
In 2016, Kim’s career changed when he began working at Per Se, in Manhattan. He had dreamed of working with Keller—of being around “the 1 percent of the 1 percent of cooks,” as he puts it—for years, since watching a video about his legendary Napa Valley restaurant, the French Laundry, and buying the restaurant’s cookbook at age 17.
Kim is adamant about kitchen etiquette. As a prep cook 10 years ago at Günter Seeger, in New York, he saw the general manager pick up garbage from the floor. “Cooks don’t do that too much because they’re busy,” says Kim. But the small act “show[ed] humbleness,” which Kim believes encouraged everyone in the kitchen to care. In his own kitchen, Kim instructs his chefs to “always look at the floor” and pick up items they drop.
I had dinner at Nōksu last month. A gust of subway air welcomed me in while 80s music played and chefs fist-bumped. Kim’s focus seemed unbreakable, his motions scientific yet innate, as I watched him prepare his current favorite dish, the surf clam, a hen-egg custard hidden in a bed of grilled surf clams and topped with potato chips delicately set around caviar in a flower-like formation. The dish pays homage to Keller’s white-truffle custard from the French Laundry, and to chef Alain Passard’s hot-cold-egg dish from Arpège, in Paris. The clams are cooked until tender and then grilled—a technique inspired by a nostalgic memory of one of his grandmother’s recipes.
Kim hopes to make it as big as Keller and Passard. This, more than a passion for cooking, is what drives him.
Jeanne Malle is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL