Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast! If you’re looking for something relaxing to do on this potentially rainy Bank Holiday weekend, you can listen to our back-catalogue of episodes with Joké Bakare, Ravneet Gill, Ferhat Dirik, Gemma Bell, Ruby Tandoh, and more, both on here and wherever you get your podcasts.
Today’s episode is with Songsoo Kim, head of sourcing and development for the Super 8 group, one of the most influential restaurant groups in London. They’re behind Basque restaurants Brat and Mountain, headed up by Tomos Parry, as well as Kiln and Smoking Goat, the modern Thai-inspired restaurants in Soho and in Shoreditch. Last month, the group opened Impala, perhaps the most anticipated new restaurant to arrive in London in the last 12 months. Four years in the making, it is chef Meedu Saad’s first solo project but a restaurant which he would admit owes a lot to the culinary expertise, vision and meticulous sourcing of Songsoo, who liaises between farmer and chef to shape dishes across the group.
As well as talking in-depth about the making of Impala and what being a head of sourcing and development actually means, we go into Songsoo’s past (she was born in Korea but grew up in rural Colorado and the south of India), we discuss her influences and the importance of food and the role of plants in her life, why she loves Thai food so much and what being part of supplier-led restaurant group has been like in practice. “I’m very curious about plants from different worlds, eating habits from different worlds, and I have a deep respect for eating and cooking as a cultural entity,” she says during the recording.
Songsoo also moonlights as a writer, and is a regular contributor to Vittles’s cooking section. It was during a conversation about the writer-editor/chef-protégé relationship a week or so after the recording of the podcast that Songsoo told me about a word in Korean, transliterated as ‘gyeol’. It means ‘texture, grain or flow’, a word that extends ‘metaphorically to the texture of a person’s soul, breath, or the rhythm of emotions.’ This is a mutuality she seeks from her collaborators: when she’s trying to convey a specific feeling in a sentence, or a particular flavour profile in a dish, there must be always depth and texture.
We hope you enjoy the episode.
Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.
A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.
We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back again later this month with the next episode: a conversation between Adam and Shuko Oda, the co-founder and executive head chef of the beloved Japanese udon-specialist Koya. We’ll see you then.
Credits
The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.
Songsoo Kim is based in London. She works for Super8 Restaurants (Kiln, Smoking Goat, Brat, Mountain) as head of sourcing and development. She has worked as a chef, and on farms for many years in South Korea, India, and the United States, which has led her to her work in a niche role in the restaurant industry. She is an advocate for farms and farmers and believes that cooking and the idea of deliciousness originate from the land.
Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.
The full Vittles masthead can be found here.
