Chef Sam Kim: 'I Said I'd Be an Accountant, but I Became a Chef'—A Story of His Mother's Debt and Guilt

Sam Kim, a veteran chef with 27 years of experience and the real-life model for Chef Choi Hyun-wook (played by Lee Sun-kyun) in the drama 'Pasta,' shed tears while sharing his most painful memory: his mother's sacrifice. Though he boarded a plane to the United States under the pretext of pursuing a stable professional career, the life he ultimately grasped was not that of an accountant, but a new life as a chef. The issue lies in the fact that his family, especially his mother, bore the full weight of that choice.

At the end of the 356th episode of the tvN variety program 'You Quiz on the Block,' which aired on the 19th, Sam Kim's appearance was previewed. Having guarded kitchens for 27 years, he revealed on the broadcast that his culinary career did not begin in a glamorous restaurant or the kitchen of a famous chef, but in the kitchen of the boarding house his mother operated during his childhood.

For Sam Kim, the kitchen was more than just a cooking space. It was a site of labor to sustain the family's livelihood, and simultaneously, his first training ground that sparked the competitiveness, curiosity, and professional identity he holds today.

Recalling his childhood, he said, "It was a time when many relatives were running boarding houses like a trend. Ours was located in front of Sogang University." He further confessed that he felt a sense of competitive drive whenever he heard stories about his aunt, who operated a boarding house near Sungkyunkwan University, mentioning that her daughter helped out with the work.

His recollection of fostering competitiveness through such minor stories of 'helping out' serves as a clue to understanding the nature of Chef Sam Kim today. While the profession of cooking is often explained through artistic sense or taste, the actual world of the kitchen is an extremely labor-intensive field that requires intense repetitive training, physical strength, endurance against hierarchy and time pressure, and immediate responsibility for the results.

The fact that he experienced the kitchen space closely from a young age suggests where his subsequent culinary philosophy originated.

However, the process of becoming a chef was not smooth from the beginning. Rather, at the most critical moment of choice, he hid his true dream from his mother.

Sam Kim confessed that when he left to study in the United States, he told his mother, "I will become an accountant." He did not honestly tell her that he was leaving to learn cooking.

"When I told my mother, she was truly angry. I departed after saying I would become an accountant," he revealed.

While the trip to the U.S. was the beginning of a new life for him, it was the starting point of another economic burden for his family. To make matters worse, as the entire Korean society was swept by the shock of the foreign exchange crisis, his family could not escape the economic turbulence.

The 1997 foreign exchange crisis, also known as the IMF crisis, was an event that completely shook the economic order of countless households. As corporate bankruptcies, mass unemployment, and financial institution restructuring continued, individual economic stability also collapsed rapidly. At that time, the concept of a 'job for life' was shaken, and the debt burden households had to bear increased sharply.

Sam Kim's family also faced that massive economic wave head-on.

He stated that his mother became a credit delinquent due to debt at the time. He also revealed that to prepare for his study abroad expenses in the U.S., his mother even took out loans from secondary financial institutions.

While he was chasing his dream of learning to cook, his mother borrowed money from financial institutions for her son's future, resulting in a situation where she had to endure the collapse of her own credit and economic life.

To Sam Kim, this memory is not merely a family history. It is a memory where the guilt of having predicated his dream on the sacrifice of another person overlaps with the belated realization of his parents' devotion.

Even more ironic is the fact that he ultimately did not become an accountant.

He left for the United States promising his mother he would choose a stable profession, but his life flowed in a completely different direction. He chose cooking, had to survive in the kitchen, and finally grew into a chef with his own name. In hindsight, that lie was his first deviation to choose his own destiny.

However, success does not automatically erase past guilt.

Upon returning to Korea, Sam Kim did not immediately start taking steps to earn money. Instead, he participated in free meal services. He confessed feeling sorry, thinking he did not fully know the reality of Korea.

"I felt so sorry because I thought I didn't know the circumstances in Korea very well. It was hard," he said, shedding tears while speaking.

Sam Kim's tears do not simply signify apology toward his mother. They are closer to an emotion stemming from the belated recognition of how someone's sacrifice was involved in the process of a person completing their dream as a profession.

Biographies of successful people are often summarized into simple narratives of dreams, effort, challenge, and overcoming. However, the actual trajectory of life is not that smooth. A person's success is a complex intertwining of family economic power, social environment, temporal conditions, accidental encounters, failures, and sometimes the sacrifice of others.

The reason Sam Kim's story is special is that it does not hide this uncomfortable truth.

The keyword piercing through his life is perhaps closer to 'responsibility' than 'cooking.' The cooking that started in his mother's boarding house kitchen led to the adventure of studying in the U.S., and while passing through the era of tragedy known as the foreign exchange crisis, it encountered the reality of family debt and sacrifice. After returning to Korea, it led to volunteering by sharing food with others through his skills.

Food is the most primal condition for human survival, but it is also a medium that stores memories and relationships. Preparing a meal for someone is closer to a promise to care for the other person's existence than a mere act of providing nutrition. The process by which Sam Kim made the kitchen the center of his life is also quite paradoxical from this perspective.

The dream of a boy, which started in the kitchen where his mother fed the boarders, later led to a chef's kitchen, and that chef then offered food to strangers through free meal services. The labor of the kitchen, which began to feed his family, eventually expanded into a professional philosophy of caring for others.

Since then, Sam Kim has established himself as one of Korea's representative star chefs. In particular, his public recognition increased greatly after he became known as the real-life figure from the drama 'Pasta.' While the drama dramatically depicted the competition, love, and pride of chefs against a kitchen backdrop, a much more complex and realistic narrative exists in the actual life of Sam Kim.

In the world of chefs on screen, a finished plate receives attention, but in a real kitchen, there is an accumulation of countless hours endured to make that single plate. For Sam Kim, the starting point of those hours was his mother.

Therefore, the tears he shed in this broadcast are not mere sentimental tears shown by a successful chef reminiscing about the past. They are closer to the repentance of a human being who belatedly understood the cost his closest person had to pay for his dream.

The son who left saying he would be an accountant ultimately became a chef. And in that process, his mother bore the debt. As time passed, the son came to have a kitchen under his own name, but in his memory, the oldest kitchen remains his mother's boarding house kitchen.

The reason why Sam Kim cannot forget that kitchen even after becoming a 27-year veteran chef is perhaps clear. It is because it is the place where his dream began, and simultaneously, the place that first made him realize what the price of that dream was.