A rare and delicious treat from Tenuta di Valgiano

As we move through summer, you might have given thought to spending some time on the beach. But have you considered honey made by beach-dwelling bees? If you appreciate single-origin honey even half as much as I do, don’t miss this one. We have a limited supply in stock at the Deli right now, and it is truly remarkable. In fact, it’s Specialty Food Manager Aislinn McAllister’s current favorite!

Unless you live on the west coast of Tuscany, odds are that you’ve never tried a honey called Miele di Spiaggia. It comes from one of our longtime, top-notch olive oil producers, the Tenuta di Valgiano. While the estate dates back to the 16th century, its place in modern culinary history is relatively recent. Laura di Collobiano, Moreno Petrini, and Saverio Petrilli took over the estate in 1992, with a commitment to turning the fruits of its ancient olive groves into an outstanding olive oil. They began farming biodynamically a few years later, with great results. The oil from the Tenuta di Valgiano estate has won an array of awards, and it’s regularly selected as one of the best in Italy. It’s lush, richly fruity, and outstandingly olivey, with a soft, prickly spiciness that spreads slowly across your tongue. Great on almost anything, from ripe red tomatoes to bruschetta, salad, or steak. The Tenuta di Valgiano team is adamant that the essence of the land must be manifested in each bottle they pack, and to my taste, they succeed in doing that year after year.

The honey comes from the beaches west of Valgiano’s land, where the bees feed on the natural flora that grows along the Lecciana seashore on the Tuscan coast. This area is part of the natural parks of Migliarino San Rossore and Massaciuccoli, where the salty waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea wash up on the sand. In the summer, the winds that Italians call “libeccio” blow salt onto the dunes, and even past them, into the Valgiano olive fields. Pine trees, heather, and helichrysum (a member of the sunflower family) live on the land. The bees sip nectar from their blossoms. And from their diligent work, we get this rare and wonderfully delicious honey.

I’ve been eating a bit of this treat, which we call Seaside Honey here at Zingerman’s, almost daily for the last few weeks. Honestly, in all my years of tasting, I’ve never really tried anything like it. Very thick and golden in color, with a beautiful butterscotch flavor and aroma. Long finish and subtly minty, I think. Terrific on toast or in tea. Tammie, who doesn’t waste time on mediocre food, worked her way through a whole jar in under a week!

In fact, the oil and the honey, served together, make a marvelous combination. Find yourself a nice-looking plate (or even an ugly one if that’s all you have). Put a healthy tablespoonful of the honey onto the center of the plate. Pour some Valgiano Olive Oil around it. Use enough oil to cover the plate and still let the honey stand up in the center, like a mountain rising out of a gold-green lake. Heat a loaf of the Bakehouse’s Paesano Bread in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes, until it’s hot in the center and the crust is crispy. Break the loaf open, and as soon as it’s cool enough, grab a chunk and drag it through the honey and the oil. Your day will be markedly better for it.

This honey is a beach vacation for your taste buds. Come grab some now!

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Even in hard times, we can create something beautiful

Svetozar Marković, the 19th-century Serbian philosopher whose 1846 birth we’ll mark next week, spent his short life pushing for an independent Serbia. While the Civil War was raging here in the U.S., Marković was fighting for freedom across the ocean. A vocal advocate for alternatives to royal rule and hierarchical thinking, he promoted community-centered models of governance—not wholly unlike what we strive for here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) today. Though Marković’s name won’t ring familiar for most Americans, in Serbia, he’s a historical star. He holds a prominent place on the modern list of the 100 most influential people in the nation’s history and continues to inspire today’s student-led democratic movements. In 1975, a postage stamp was issued in his honor, and five years later, a feature film told the story of his life.

In 1874, at just 27 years old, Marković was arrested after publishing writings that challenged royal rule. His trial quickly became a rallying point for the Serbian resistance, with local peasants reportedly packing the courtroom. Convicted of “defaming the prince,” he was sentenced to nine months in prison. While there, his tuberculosis worsened, and not long after his release, he died of the disease in the then Austro-Hungarian town of Trieste. He was only 28.

Marković was also an important literary critic, regularly advocating the belief that writing could play a meaningful role in helping to make the world a better place. He believed that, at its best, published work should be practical—something people could use to help them grapple with the difficult issues of their day. Given the challenges of the times we’re living through, my hope is that what follows might do a bit of the same: offer some framing and insight that can help caring leaders—whether here in southeast Michigan, in Manitoba, in Mongolia, or in Marković’s homeland of Serbia—be more effective in facing the array of challenges that regularly appear before them.

In his later years, Marković reflected that “true wisdom is not in knowing everything, but in understanding what truly matters.” One piece of wisdom I’ve come to see—all too clearly from my own experience over these many years in business—is that the leaders and organizations who do well over the long haul are almost always remarkably good at working through hard times. They may not enjoy them, but they learn to handle the difficulties at hand without decompensating. As author, translator, and teacher Ilan Stavans says, “What is important is not what happens but what people make of it.”

Alongside all these inevitable challenges, there are plenty of inspiring moments too. Just last week, I had the chance to teach at a ZingTrain Community Event in Boston at which I shared learnings about “Managing Ourselves” with 60 or so very engaged attendees. Thanks to everyone at Oleana, Sofra, Boston University, and my friends Ana Sortun and Sara Febroth for making it all happen! And, as this enews goes out, we’ll also be celebrating the newest inductees into the Zingerman’s Service Hall of Fame that I wrote about a few weeks back.

After an inspiring week in Boston, my focus now shifts to the keynote I’ll be delivering the day after Svetozar Marković’s September 9th birthday. I’ll be heading to Dallas to open the Great Game of Business open-book management conference. The topic for my talk—“A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace”—is a subject that feels increasingly close to my heart with each passing day.

Part of the answer, I’ll suggest, is how we approach those times. Per the self-fulfilling belief cycle I wrote about in The Power of Beliefs in Business, what we believe about tough times has a big impact on how tough it is to get through them. If we believe that difficult challenges are an unfortunate aberration, that there’s something wrong with the world when they happen, that we have unfairly become helpless victims of other people’s failures, then periods of great difficulty and high uncertainty—like the one we’re in nationally right now—can be nearly impossible to overcome.

Those, of course, are not the beliefs we’ve been working with here at Zingerman’s for the last 43 years—if they were, we’d never have made it nearly this far. To the contrary, the beliefs I’ll be sharing as an entrée into my Dallas talk are strongly held, positive approaches to challenging situations:

• Tough times are the norm, not the exception. In other words, like them or not, they happen a lot!
• Dignity is a reliable guide. No matter how tough the situation, dignity can only help. To paraphrase one of my business partner Paul Saginaw’s favorite sayings on generosity: “Dignity is never out of season.”
• Proactive approaches matter. There are many ways we can remain effective in the face of adversity and uncertainty.
• Pause and ground yourself. No matter the challenge, it’s almost always wise to take a few seconds, breathe deeply, and get grounded before acting.

Having practiced these approaches for over 40 years, I can say with certainty that they hold true not just for those of us in the food world, but in life more broadly—and even, for that matter, in football. I usually shy away from sports analogies, but this one is too accurate to ignore. Writing in The Athletic this past weekend about second-year Bears quarterback Caleb Williams and his early career struggles, Dan Wiederer commented,

A significant part of the Bears’ evaluation of Williams this season will center on his ability to respond to rough plays, shaky series and frustrating moments. … As general manager Ryan Poles called it, “When bad things happen, it’s showing the ability to recover again.”

It’s easy, of course, to critique a highly paid quarterback in a profession many watch but few ever play. But the standard the Bears are applying to Caleb Williams holds true for the rest of us as well. When bad things happen, we need to show that we can recover well—and do it with grace. Difficult days inevitably abound. We can’t prevent them, but we can learn how to get better at handling them.

How we respond to challenges is shaped in part by what we learned in our families. It’s also, it turns out, impacted in part by when we were born. A few years ago, finance expert Morgan Housel wrote a marvelous little book called The Psychology of Money. Among its many insights, one especially struck me: when we grow up almost always has a profound impact on what we believe about money. Looking back, I realize I could have seen this sooner—I wrote in The Power of Beliefs in Business about how our beliefs are formed. But this, really, is why I read: to learn from others. Housel’s perspective helped me a lot. Using inflation as an example, he writes,

If you were born in 1960s America, inflation during your teens and 20s—your young, impressionable years when you’re developing a base of knowledge about how the economy works—sent prices up more than threefold. That’s a lot. You remember gas lines and getting paychecks that stretched noticeably less far than the ones before them. But if you were born in 1990, inflation has been so low for your whole life that it’s probably never crossed your mind.

No one should expect members of these groups to go through the rest of their lives thinking the same thing about inflation. Or the stock market. Or unemployment. Or money in general. No one should expect them to respond to financial information the same way. No one should assume they are influenced by the same incentives.

I want to say much the same about our relationship to handling difficult, uncertain times. If you went into business during a period of relative social and economic calm, it would make sense to believe that calm was the norm. That belief can make it harder to navigate when trouble comes. It tends to catch people who aren’t accustomed to it off guard. Folks often grow frustrated, lose confidence, point fingers—first at others, then at themselves.

By contrast, people who grew up in hard times tend to see prosperity as the exception. They may enjoy it, but they never count on it lasting. They assume the next crisis is just around the corner. In a sense, that’s Zingerman’s. When we opened the Deli in 1982, inflation rates were approaching 18%. Unemployment was high, especially here in Michigan. The Cold War was still going strong. Since then, we’ve seen three recessions, 9/11, a stock market collapse, January 6th, and a pandemic. Calm is not the norm. The belief that hard times are pretty common is pretty common around the ZCoB—and probably hence embedded into the essence of our organization. Not in a foreboding way. We feel incredibly fortunate and work at appreciation and joy every day. It just means that we assume hard times will come—they’re just another obstacle to work around, not a sign of impending doom. A reminder to take a deep breath, get grounded, and get to work on figuring out what we will do.

My friend Kate Mueller in Maine is still dealing with the sadness of having her pup pass away this past spring. Kate, whose life was centered around her incredibly athletic, endurance trail walking skills, came down with Long Covid early in the pandemic. She has pushed through and found ways to remake her life. Part of that seems to be reframing her belief around the challenges she faces:

“Normal” life is a rollercoaster. Things are always falling apart and coming back together, then falling apart again. Stuff breaks. We get stressed, we get anxious, we get depressed.

Trying to define “normal” as somehow absent of those things has this implicit effect of making us feel bad for not being “normal.” And if your situation is turning out to be more chronic and long-lasting—like long Covid, for example—it makes you feel like you will never be “normal” again. No bueno.

Learning to handle difficulties well can lead to remarkably positive outcomes. Thinkers as different as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis—“If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you”—and the anarchic Beat poet Charles Bukowski—“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire”—have voiced this truth. More recently, historian Robin D.G. Kelley added his own perspective: “Love and study cannot exist without struggle.”

In “Bottom Line Change,” I wrote about my realization that we, and most organizations, had been working with the belief that change was an aberration, something to “get through.” My belated glimpse of the obvious was that change was actually the norm, and the sooner we embraced that reality and began to work to get good at change, the healthier our organization would be and the better we would do. It worked. Making the five-step Bottom-Line Change® recipe part of our normal routine has made us a calmer and more effective business.

As I’m suggesting here, the same is true for difficult times. I don’t love them any more than I love change (which isn’t much), but I’ve worked to get good at dealing with them. Like it or not, they’re part of what we all live with. In just the past few weeks, a friend had to put down her beloved dog, another lost a brother-in-law unexpectedly, and yet another still saw their brother-in-law go through a tough surgery. Here in our organization, people we thought would be with us for years have decided suddenly to leave, while others who left some time ago want to come back when we don’t necessarily have a spot. I’ve also been dealing with my own health issues this summer (I’ll be okay!). And all of us, like the folks I’ll be speaking to at the Great Game of Business conference in Dallas, are carrying the weight of the larger world—economic uncertainty, the low-grade anxiety so many feel, the ripple effects of customers suddenly losing jobs or Federal funds. None of it is easy. But it’s not going away either. The key, I’ve come to believe, is getting good at dealing with it.

This is certainly true for any of us advocating democracy and dignity. The erosion of the rule of law and due process, paired with increasingly authoritarian activity from those in power, is raising stress levels across the board. According to the non-profit Freedom House, only about 20% of the world’s population now lives under democratic constructs—a figure that declined again this past year, marking the 17th consecutive annual drop.

We clearly have our work cut out for us. Difficult days are at hand. In the spirit of what I wrote last week about free choice, rather than retreating, I willingly choose the path of resistance. It will be more difficult, but as I’ve written, I believe democracy matters. In his 2010 book In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred, philosopher Sam Keen—who passed away this past spring—writes,

The men and women who made an enduring mark on history, for better and for worse, ignored the accepted worldviews, values and myths of their time and chose to pursue their own answers to their deepest questions.

This is certainly what Svetozar Marković was doing in Serbia in the 19th century and what I believe we are working hard, ever imperfectly, to make happen here in the ZCoB.

The normalness of dealing with difficulty was summed up beautifully by M. Scott Peck many years ago in his best-selling 1978 tome, The Road Less Traveled:

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead, they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy.

The hard road, it turns out then, is not really less traveled. At least not at its entrance—we all, after all, struggle. What is far less trafficked, though, is the part of the road on which people have successfully seen their struggles through.

So, what do we do when we find ourselves confronted with hard stuff? Here are some techniques that, when we practice them regularly and implement them effectively, can help us confront the inevitable challenges that are going to come our way:

1. Stay centered. As historian Timothy Snyder writes in his terrific little book, On Tyranny, “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.” Whatever ways one has to stay centered can really help a lot. They won’t fix the problem, but they can put us in a better position to do so. Journaling, running, writing, walking in nature, reading, making art, talking to friends, and more can all help.
2. Revisit your vision. Or if you don’t yet have one, write one. Yes, it may feel difficult to do under duress, but—having written many hundreds—take my word for it, it’s eminently doable. After all, if we don’t know where we’re going, it’s hard to deal effectively with day-to-day difficulties, which can quickly leave us feeling lost.
3. Check your values and guiding principles. Working within the framework of our values, our philosophy helps us to stay focused on responding in ways that are aligned with our ethics. Problems will still be present, but regret is reduced, getting to good outcomes is more likely, and we will feel better about what we’re doing.
4. Get help. University of Michigan Business School professor Wayne Baker’s All You Have to Do is Ask is a great guide to learning why and how getting help is such a positive way to go. Very often, people we know—or people that people we know know—are actually able to assist us with our challenges far more than we might at first imagine. We’ll never know, though, unless we ask! In her great book, The Black Working Class, historian Blair Kelley writes about the washerwomen who organized themselves in Mississippi in 1865 for the betterment of the group. These women—all of whom were still enslaved even a few years prior—created an effective effort at collective action. Kelley writes, “They cannot change the overall circumstances and difficulties they’re facing, but they can support one another and set boundaries and limits and build community out of the struggle.”
5. Make sure the difficulties you’re dealing with are the ones you want. Natural Law #9 is that success gets you better problems. In Managing Ourselves, one of the top tips I share is: “Be ready to embrace the uncomfortable.” Dealing with duress and hard times is hard. But it becomes self-defeating if what’s hard is working at work you don’t believe in, with people you don’t like working with, etc. By contrast, taking on the challenge of working hard in hard times to advocate and actualize deeply held beliefs remains difficult, but it is a difficulty we choose to deal with because we believe in where we’re going. It’s a huge difference. This is the crux of what I will say in Dallas next month about dignity.
6. Talk to others about what you’re struggling with. Far too many people, living with the belief that a life filled with challenges is a failure, fail to share their struggles. Which just further deepens the roots of the belief that a life well lived will be wonderfully, exclusively full of puppies and rainbows. What happens is a bit of what Ukrainian poet and musician Serhiy Zhadan writes:You will never write about
   how it all really was.
   You won’t dare, you’ll keep it to yourself,
   put it aside, keep it in the dark.Nearly every time I share my struggles with others, I find that their problems are surprisingly parallel to mine. Talking together won’t make the issues at hand go away, but it does seem to consistently reduce both my own stress and theirs.
7. Share stories of struggle in the organization. If the only stories folks we work with hear are of either big, easy success or total collapse, they fail to understand that most progress happens only while working through adversity. It matters that we also share our failures, so staff know we’re not hiding the hard parts and can trust that we act with integrity. Per what I wrote about resistance a few months back: when Bobby Flam decided to integrate his restaurant Jumbos in Miami in 1968, half his staff quit the next day, and a number of customers stopped coming. He stayed the course, living his values rather than going with the flow. Kudos! Similarly, when I teach our organizational history, I regularly share that most of our long-term visions have come only after working hard to come to a consensus after any number of uncomfortable conversations. The authenticity and self-awareness that Ji Hye Kim, long-time chef and partner at Miss Kim, shared in last week’s enews have taken her years to develop. And I repeat regularly: Natural Law #11—It takes a lot longer to make something great happen than most people think. And Natural Law #7—Successful businesses do the things that others know they should do … but generally don’t.
8. Make art! Artistic expression remains one of the best ways I know to get emotional clarity and to share our pain and our positive messages. Eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin pointed out, “He who has not felt the difficulties of his art does nothing that counts.” In our own era, poet Jane Hirshfield writes:Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration … The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering’s only open path is through an immersion in what is.Both Svetozar Marković and I, like Hirshfield, rely on writing, but poetry, painting, poster-making, music, sculpture, collage so many other methods of creative expression can help to both calm one’s soul and share stress at the same time. Poet Charles Bukowski writes,what can I do?
   it’s true:
   pain and suffering helps to
   create what we call art.
9. Find the joy! In the metaphorical organizational ecosystem model, joy is the butterfly. Healthy ecosystems attract butterflies. Noticing them takes attention—even in the toughest of times, I’ve found that there is still an abundance of joy there for me to benefit from. Mostly, it just takes paying attention! On down days, joy can boost a mood.
10. Stay hopeful. Per what I wrote a few weeks ago, if we lose hope, things will not go well.

None of these techniques will guarantee that we can get through hard times without hardship, but all will certainly increase the odds of coming out on the other side in reasonably good shape.

Through four decades of doing business at Zingerman’s, I still can’t say I like dealing with difficult situations, but I do believe we can—and will—get through them successfully. When we do, the odds are high that our already good relationships will have grown stronger, even if only briefly before the next set of challenges arrives.

With each difficult period we navigate, we learn more to help us through the next. And, per the old Serbian folk saying,

Sve se može što se hoće. Ko hoće nađe način:
When you really want to do something, you will find a way to do it.

Hold strong, breathe deep, don’t get too down, dig into dignity, reach out for help, and let me know what you learn.

As always, we’re all in this together!

Help holding course

Chocolate, coffee, culture, mole, mountains, and more!

If you’re ready for a week of exceptional eating in a completely different cuisine, digging into incredible history that goes back thousands of years, and surrounding yourself with bright colors, kind people, and beautiful sights—all in a magical mid-sized town in southern Mexico—check out the Zingerman’s Food Tour that Managing Partner Kristie Brablec has put together to take 12 fortunate folks to Oaxaca. Oaxaca is, quite simply, an outstanding place to go.

I had the pleasure of spending a week in Oaxaca last winter and all I can say is, “Wow!” Amazing food, the historical home of mole, beautiful weather (like 80°F, dry, and sunny every day), fascinating history that goes from ancient times to late 19th century anarchists to modernist galleries, an array of authentically artisan shops, and an impressive number of exceptional coffee shops—you can seemingly get a really fine shot of espresso every couple blocks. Oaxaca has great museums, abundant markets, excellent restaurants, and superb small shops—what more can I tell you? It’s a positive place to be! By the end of my week, I was wondering if we should look for a house there!

As I mentioned earlier, Oaxaca seems to have almost everything I’m intrigued by. The food is extraordinary—Anthony Bourdain once said that “in Oaxaca, ancient indigenous traditions and ingredients define … but also the food.” Its history is equally compelling, shaped by repeated efforts to build healthy non-hierarchical communities. Author Staughton Lynd writes about the many “experiments in government from below” that have happened in Oaxaca over the centuries. For those of us who live—like I do—in places with cold winters, it’s my kind of weather, with no humidity and a wealth of warm sun. Plus, Oaxaca is wonderfully walkable.

The Zingerman’s Food Tour kicks off with a compelling class on mole-making to get you into the Oaxaca spirit of the region’s classic sauce. Follow that with an in-depth field trip to a local maker of artisan mezcal. There are mountain hikes, a visit to a remarkable regenerative farm, a class about Oaxacan chocolate-making traditions (replete with plenty of tasting), a visit to Zapotec archeological sites, amazing market visits, and so much more! Kristie is incredibly passionate about Oaxaca, and that passion shines through!

Make your way to Mexico

An easy-to-make, excellent-to-eat taste of the southern Mediterranean

One of my favorite evening meals, this is a simple dish that I learned in Tunisia when I first went to visit my friends Majid and Onsa Mahjoub! Their hospitality was terrific. I came home with enormous appreciation for the complex and rich culture of Tunisia and the compelling nature of its cuisine! Very different from Moroccan cooking to the west and Egyptian to the east, Tunisian cuisine has a whole host of terrific dishes in which the Mahjoub family’s fantastic products all shine. Sun-dried harissa, hand-rolled organic couscous, extra virgin olive oil made from the family’s Chetoui varietal olives … all are amazing.

This dish is a good example of the southern Italian influence on Tunisia. Start with great artisan spaghetti like Mancini, Rustichella, or Gentile. All the long pasta we have on hand at the Deli will work well. You’ll also want a good tomato sauce. Either make your own with some of the great canned tomatoes we have (Miragallo, Bianco DiNapoli, Gentile), or use one of the bottled sauces we have from Miragallo or Il Mongetto. Heat the sauce and stir in a good bit of the marvelous sun-dried harissa that the Mahjoubs make. I like it a lot, but if you’re more sensitive to heat, then use just a small bit.

Meanwhile, prep the seafood. Cubes of fresh tuna or swordfish work really well. Same goes for fresh squid, shrimp, or scallops. Sauté them in olive oil with a pinch of sea salt until they’re just barely cooked through. Then add the hot tomato sauce to the pan and let it all come together. If you want to try it with tinned fish, try sardines, tuna, mussels, or octopus from the Deli’s wonderful tinned fish selection. I like to mix together more than one to get a bit of diversity of flavor and texture into the dish. When the pasta is al dente, take it out with tongs and add it to the pan with the sauce. Toss well and cook another minute or two so the pasta absorbs the sauce. Quick and easy to make, wonderful to eat. Serve with some extra harissa and olive oil on the side.

Tunisians seem to eat this dish a lot. It’s one of Majid’s favorites. “What I like,” he told me, “is the subtle combination between the very high-quality ingredients and healthy products. This dish—like couscous—summarizes all the healthy Mediterranean culinary art!”

Little Kim Comes to Kerrytown

There’s exciting news on the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) front! Little Kim, Miss Kim’s smaller, vegetarian sister, is now officially open! A new Zingerman’s space calls for space on the page, so I’ll pause and let that sink in for a sec.

Just across the walkway from Miss Kim, our newly opened spot offers up managing partner and chef Ji Hye Kim’s nationally renowned Korean cooking—this time in a more casual, counter service set up. All the dishes on the menu are either vegetarian or vegan. Little Kim offers folks a chance to enjoy some of Jy Hye’s great cooking in a quicker context. It’s cool, it’s casual! Come by and check it out. Little Kim is open every day but Monday, 11:30 am to 5 pm. (Miss Kim is closed on Tuesdays.)

While hope, like loading brush, will barely be noticed by most people, the opening of a new business tends to garner far greater attention. And yet, opening a new business is in itself a profoundly hopeful act. No one starts a new restaurant without having some positive beliefs about the future. By definition, they’ve made a plan for how to get wherever it is they want to go. If the new business has a sense of community, it will make clear that each person—customers and crew alike—counts. The work done in the early days matters. If the place is going to make it past the first month, it has to. Done well, a new business is a quiet acknowledgment that the little things make a big difference. As I said in an interview this past week, in a restaurant, that starts with smiles out front and salt levels in the back. It’s also a statement that we’re all, humbly, part of something far greater than ourselves.

Little Kim’s arrival in Ann Arbor has been lighting up the local press of late! Pretty much every major publication in southeastern Michigan has made complimentary mention of Ji Hye’s remarkable cooking and the new, as of last week, Little Kim.

Eater Detroit says of Ji Hye,

Kim’s origins are as humble as the small Midwest city she calls home. She trained not in culinary school but in the kitchens of local restaurants such as Zingerman’s Delicatessen and Zingerman’s Roadhouse (another top-ranked A2 restaurant). Her greatest culinary inspiration? Her mom, a talented home cook who made batches of kimchi every fall with seasonal vegetables, dumplings for New Year’s, and rice cakes for harvest festivals. Her personal favorite was seaweed soup.

“It’s known as birthday soup, because every Korean child gets it on their birthday. So American kids get cake; Korean kids get seaweed soup.”

The menu at Little Kim includes all kinds of great vegetarian and vegan options. Here at the height of the local produce season, it happens to be a near-perfect time to open Little Kim. Given Ji Hye’s passion for local produce, the abundance that early August always brings will be a blessing in even fuller flavor than usual! 

Ji Hye’s Eggs in Gochujang Purgatory is at the top of my list. It’s got a great gochujang (Korean chile sauce) spiked tomato marinara, lots of tender chickpeas, all topped with a sunny-side-up egg. Toasted Bakehouse Farm bread is served on the side! This super tasty treat is inspired by the culinary internship Ji Hye did many years ago in Rome. And that is only the opening bid on the great meals you’ll be able to eat and enjoy from the Little Kim kitchen!

Learn more about Little Kim