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

Sam Kim, a veteran chef with 27 years of experience known as the real-life model for Chef Choi Hyun-wook (played by Lee Sun-kyun) in the drama 'Pasta,' recently revealed his most painful memory, shedding tears while discussing his mother's immense sacrifice.While he boarded a plane to the United States under the guise of pursuing a stable professional career, the reality in his hands was not an accounting certification, but a new life as a chef. The problem was that his family, particularly his mother, had to bear the full weight of that choice.

In the upcoming episode of the tvN variety show 'You Quiz on the Block,' Sam Kim's appearance is highlighted. He shared that his culinary journey 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 where competitiveness, curiosity, and his future professional identity were formed.

Recalling his childhood, he said, "It was a time when many relatives were running boarding houses like a trend. Ours was in front of Sogang University." He admitted 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 nurturing competitiveness through these small stories serves as a clue to understanding the character of Chef Sam Kim. While the profession of cooking is often explained through artistic sense or taste, the reality of the professional 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 since childhood suggests where his culinary philosophy originated. However, the process of becoming a chef was not smooth from the beginning. Instead, 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 recalled.

While the trip to the U.S. marked the start of a new life for him, it was the starting point for 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 shook the economic order of countless households. As a chain of corporate bankruptcies, mass unemployment, and restructuring of financial institutions followed, individual economic stability also collapsed rapidly. At that time, the concept of a 'lifetime job' was shaken, and the debt burden on households increased sharply.

Sam Kim's family faced this massive economic wave head-on. He revealed that his mother became a credit delinquent due to debt at that time. Furthermore, he confessed that his mother even took out loans from secondary financial institutions to prepare for his studies in the United States.

While he was chasing his dream of learning to cook, his mother borrowed money from financial institutions for her son's future, ultimately enduring a situation where her own credit and economic life were ruined.

To Sam Kim, this memory is not just a family history. It is a memory where the guilt of having placed his dream upon the sacrifice of another intersects with the belated realization of his parents' devotion.

Even more ironic is the fact that he did not ultimately become an accountant. Although he promised his mother he would choose a stable professional career and left for the U.S., his life flowed in a completely different direction. He chose cooking, had to survive in the kitchen, and finally grew into a chef under his own name. Looking back, that lie was his first deviation to choose his own destiny.

However, success does not automatically erase the guilt of the past. Upon returning to Korea, Sam Kim did not immediately take steps to make money. Instead, he participated in free meal services. He confessed feeling sorry, thinking that he did not fully understand the reality of Korea.

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

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

The 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 entanglement 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 running through his life is perhaps closer to 'responsibility' than 'cooking.' The cooking that began in his mother's boarding house kitchen led to the adventure of studying in the U.S., and as he passed through the historical tragedy of the foreign exchange crisis, he faced the reality of family debt and sacrifice. And after returning to Korea, it led to volunteer work sharing food with others through his skills.

Food is a primal condition for human survival, but it is also a medium that stores memories and relationships. Preparing a meal for someone is more like a promise to care for their existence than a simple act of providing nutrition. From this perspective, the process by which Sam Kim made the kitchen the center of his life is quite paradoxical.

The dream of a boy, which began in the kitchen where his mother fed the boarders, later led to a chef's kitchen, and that chef then handed food to strangers through free meal services. The labor in the kitchen that 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. His public recognition increased significantly, especially after being known as the real person from the drama 'Pasta.' While the drama dramatically depicted the competition, love, and pride of chefs against a kitchen background, Sam Kim's real life contains a much more complex and realistic narrative.

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 one plate. For Sam Kim, the starting point of those hours was his mother.

Therefore, the tears he shed on this broadcast are not simple sentimental tears from 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 become an accountant eventually 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, his 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 both the place where his dream began and the place that first made him realize what the price of that dream was.