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Sang Kim

@chefsangkim

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WRITER | TV HOST | CHEF
📕EATING DOGS - STORIES & RECIPES (Coming Soon)
📺 SEARCHING WITH CHEF SANG- SEASON 1 & 2 on @tlntv @vivatv.ca

POSTS STORIES REELS

Very pleased to announce that SEARCHING WITH CHEF SANG: Season 2 will be premiering across Canada on Thursday January 2nd, 2025. You can watch the 6-episode series every Thursday night on TLN or stream it anytime on VIVA TV.

While we crossed this great and vast country, our team was heartily welcomed by generous people who took the time to share their stories and food with us. We departed with our hearts and bellies satiated. And today, I am honoured to call these people my friends, fellow seekers.

My gratitude to the extraordinary producers/directors Lucy Cameron, Emma Fox and Lonelle Selbo—I am blessed to have shared creative space with such naturally gifted storytellers. To Francis and David Mitchell of Riverbank Pictures—thank you for the gift of your epic vision and eye for detail! Thanks Joseph Shabason for your inimitable score that lifts everything. To Quan, Sean, Frankie, Brian, and all the others who captured the music of all our voices—my heart to you.

Thank you @tlntv @tln.tv @tln_studios @vivatv.ca for having the courage to add new entries to the growing collective epic we call The Canadian Experience.

Most importantly, my deepest gratitude to the guests for opening your hearts and pantries to us. Thank you for teaching me new ways to listen, for nourishing me. It is my hope our show did you and your stories justice.

#searchingwithchefsang #tln #riverbankpictures #chefsangkim by @chefsangkim

This journey, conceived during the simpler days before the pandemic, has since taken me down some unexpected paths.

I view these digressions today as inevitable—blessings in disguise.

I have been deeply touched by the people I’ve met along the way, by their beauty, audacity, kindness and hospitality– and, of course, by the epic food they shared with me, the bread we broke together.

I hope you will join us on this odyssey.

SEARCHING WITH CHEF SANG: SEASON ONE premieres this Sunday September 3rd, 8pm EST on @TLNTV

I also hope you will kindly share this post with those who like a good story populated with good people, but with this one caveat: that if the show does not rise to the occasion of the guests and their stories, they are not to blame, nor the immensely talented team who served as the creative scaffolding for the project; it is strictly the shortcomings of the host and his alone.

#searchingwithchefsang #riverbankpictures #tln #canadianstories #koreancanadian #home
#meaford #toronto #thunderbay #stcatharines #niagarafalls #kawarthas by @chefsangkim

The pastor’s wife is the most industrious resident of the village, and my choice for its kindest. By the time South Korean soldiers have assembled their firearms at the morning shooting drill, she has already completed her neighbourhood welfare check—delivering sweet potatoes and the sweetest of persimmons to the elderly, and taxiing back and forth from town on grocery and pharmaceutical errands for anybody who asks. There is missionary zeal in everything she does.

She and her husband have taken up residence here, this close to the DMZ, in anticipation of a breach.

“The war of reunification,” she told me during an otherwise sunny ride into town today, “is an opportunity to free the thousands of Christians who have been forced underground in North Korea.”

At the entrance to my favourite cafe, she rolled down her window.

“Why not join us, Mr. Kim?” she said cheerfully.
In response, I offered her a nervous titter, followed by a signature Kim smile; you know, one of those evocatively ambivalent ones that the Supreme Leader himself would have given if asked to lead a crusade. by @chefsangkim

My ears are reminded daily that the war is ever-present—that it is not, has never been, over. Wars don’t go away because men of military distinction sign a document in some vaunted (and heated) room to end it. Nor did the armistice signed by distinguished American and Chinese and Russian military men silence the unimaginable and unnameable (and cold) anxiety Koreans experience today, 73 years later.

At the place I am staying, or Gancheon, the army base town I go to to buy groceries (12,112 steps away), even when I venture to the refugee corridor of Abai, in the nearest crammed city, Sokcho, to experience a different kind of loneliness, I bump into the casualties of sound. They don’t have two-thousand yard stares, they don’t dress in hanboks for the sake of Instalikes, they don’t pretend to understand K-anything.

They just hear…things.

But it is here, close to the North Korean border, here where artillery “exercises” scatter the morning magpies, disrupt the unfolding of a farmer’s unfettered harvesting for the day, that I hear it most.

Makes me wonder what my father felt, at the age of twelve, when he heard the shots ringing out around him that would take the lives of his family and friends. by @chefsangkim

I once knew a precocious—and according to some of the prettier maidens in the village, “impossibly handsome”—boy, who interrupted his father during a bedtime reading to ask: “why do all these stories start with ‘once upon a time’ but never end the same way?” Even then, it seemed to the five-year-old (as he sat up in his bed to admire himself in his mother’s hand mirror) that the fairytale world belonged to some ineffable place in some inaccessible past, and always beyond the reach of a child’s real life experience of playing ddakji or catching frogs. The Brothers Grimm just didn’t get it and his father stopped reading to him at bedtime.

The boy is now in northeast Gangwon Province, a remote farming village ten miles away from the DMZ as the crow flies. He came here to embark on a three-month quest, backwards through space and time, to retrace the route to his late father’s origin story; here at the end where everything begins, once upon a time. by @chefsangkim

Will be teaching children a kitchen skill or five at Young Foodies Camp during Toronto Public Library’s Summer Wonder. Conducting 2 x 3-day workshops at @albionlibrary and McGregor Park Library.

On the menu: Sushi, Tacos, Boba.

Parents, register your kids @torontolibrary

#summerwonder #torontopubliclibrary #tpl by @chefsangkim

I spent an inordinate chunk of my adult life avoiding places and parties where fried rice was on the menu. I naturally blame my stunted maturity, being a culinary snob (as though this category of snobbery was any better than the tiresome generic snobbery I’m afflicted with today), and the most tangible reminder of growing up downright poor.

So, imagine being invited by one of the most interesting and innovative food dudes in the city, Len Senater, to talk about food, memory, and fried rice—and to eat the disdained dish without the burden of making it myself? Oh, how easily the grainy road to happiness is paved with good intentions and even better leftovers.

Thank you, @thedepanneur and Ian and Natalie for hosting a sublime night of lively chatter, the cups of kindnesses from new acquaintances, deep strolls in and out of nostalgia, and the delicious dishes (the mi-yeok-guk tastes exactly like my grandmother’s). Thank you @gustograpes for the restorative conversation and these photos.

All of it a much-needed break from my snobbish life by @chefsangkim

It won’t tax your cerebral cortex to recognize why the show and its hosts are so beloved in this country. The entire @thesocialctv team, front and bts, work unflaggingly to make everything appear so effortless. And fun.

10+ years sharing some of my favourite food and life stories with this incredible cast and crew has been a joy and privilege.

Another interesting segment, following my latest trip to South Korea: souvenir gift ideas for a dinner party. Does anyone really want another fridge magnet or keychain?

Check out the whole segment on CTV or YouTube.
#TheSocial #CTV #ctvthesocial by @chefsangkim

Feeling good about the @bluejays forcing game 7 against the Seattle Mariners in the ALCS. Oh, and what a fabulous closing job @lindsey.deluce did with her kimbap during the final frame on @yourmorning —yet another sign that she was either a Korean chef in a former life or should be stepping on the mound in the 9th tonight for the Jays.

Thanks @shanchambers_ for the first pitch, @palomaalamode for calling the game, and @jasonskrobar for always being the best designated hitter of any team.

#loveourteam by @chefsangkim

It was at my secret sanctuary in the city where I read my first Yiyun Li book. When the world’s noise grows too clamorous, I come here seeking silence, and often in the company of less chatty writers: Rilke, Wendell Berry, Han Kang, and since 2018, Yiyun Li.

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life details her experience with suicidal depression and the luminous consolations of literature. The memoir arrived at a particularly opaque time in my own life and was exactly what my inner spiritual advisor ordered. Her voice radiated quiet strength and the type of deep loving wisdom that only those who have delivered themselves from the abyss can impart. Vividly, I recall her sentences appearing like distant fireworks, cascading splendidly against my dark night.

“There is no good way to say this,” is how she opens her latest memoir, Things In Nature Merely Grow, repeating the studied words of a detective in her living room. What seems unspeakable as she and her husband navigate the loss of their nineteen year-old son James in 2024, after losing their sixteen year-old Vincent in 2017, both by suicide, is expressed the way only Yiyun can: unsentimentally, elegantly, and with courage few can muster. Words are issued with hardness and precision, flint meeting steel at acute angles to give just the adequate amount of fuel and flicker to “that sensation for which there is no name”.

She is all guts.

Today, I finished this, her latest book, and I leave my sanctuary asking myself the same question I asked that first time: how do I repay this fine writer and great woman when all I have to offer is this paltry sum of the deepest gratitudes? by @chefsangkim

In his attempt to prove just how acclimated he was as a Canadian during our first year, my father, after sampling his Canadian boss’s Eggplant-Marinara-Parm Burger at a staff picnic, decided he would have a go at it for his own brood. (These things seldom went well in my family.) And although it wasn’t as bad as I described it here, it certainly wasn’t as good as he described his boss’s original.

Sometimes some of us need to make-do with stuff from our own roots, so here’s the way a Canadian bulgogi burger looks to me.

Father’s Day patio segment with The Dream Team on CTV’s @yourmorning

Producer: Katie Jamieson
Stylist: Suzanne Wall
Host: @annemariemediwake by @chefsangkim

@chefsangkim’s library story began when he was a newcomer to Canada. @torontolibrary became his second home. Now, he gives back to the library community by teaching free cooking programs at library branches across the city to reach youth from all neighbourhoods.

It’s the perfect example of how libraries are so much more than books. Libraries give youth a place where they belong, and can learn valuable life skills and socialize with each other. Our Spring Campaign is raising vital funds for TPL’s highest priority needs, including teen social health and mental well-being. Donations are DOUBLED until Friday, June 13th 💙💙

⛓️tplfoundation.ca/match by @chefsangkim