Yuen: Young Joni is gone. Can we stop trying to cancel Ann Kim?

Young Joni, a signature creation of chef Ann Kim’s genius, will quietly close this weekend after a lease dispute with her landlord, an unceremonious detour from her rapid ascension in the Minneapolis dining scene.

It’s the second restaurant she’s shuttered, after her Uptown establishment and her most personal business concept to date, Kim’s, closed more than a year ago following a contentious unionization effort.

That’s not all the restaurateur has faced over the past year. Kim has fielded criticisms of union busting, vitriolic online attacks, an act of vandalism at her Uptown restaurant and bizarre protests by duck-rights activists.

“There’s a Latin term, annus horribilis — the ‘horrible year.’ Everybody has them," said fellow celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern. “I’m heartbroken for my friend, who’s a phenomenal chef and restaurateur and who’s extremely creative.”

Once upon a time, we made Ann Kim our hero. Her story of reinvention and embrace of her true self inspired legions. Kim emigrated with her family from South Korea to the United States as a kid, fought societal and familial expectations for much of her life, abandoned a career as a stage actor to follow a passion for pizza and achieved worldwide culinary acclaim.

When she and husband Conrad Leifur opened their first restaurant in 2010, Pizzeria Lola, Kim bet big that Minnesotans would come to accept and even crave kimchi on their pizzas. She helped cement Minneapolis as a foodie haven while reviving neighborhoods with vibrancy and buzz. And she led with her heart, urging us to “[expletive] fear” in an emotional speech after accepting a James Beard Award in 2019.

Then she became our local villain.

After the restaurant closed last year, the local union filed a labor complaint. In July, the National Labor Relations Board conditionally dismissed claims from Unite Here Local 17 alleging Kim’s company violated federal laws aimed to protect workers who organize. An investigation found that while there was some “arguable merit” to some of the union’s claims, they were limited in scope. The allegations will be dismissed unless a similar complaint comes forward before January.

The president of Local 17 declined to comment on the board’s decision.

Kim, 52, is left to pick up the pieces and ponder her future while facing a double standard that women, especially women of color, are held to when they make tough business decisions. It leaves some of us wondering: Would she have been canceled if she were a man?

Consider the diverging fate of chef Daniel del Prado. The restaurateur took a similar path as Kim, closing all four of his Cafe Cerés locations this year after his staff voted to unionize. In many circles, abruptly closing shop before negotiating with workers on a contract is seen as union-busting. But del Prado continues to build his empire. He’s on his way to starting up no less than four new restaurants in the area.

Kim declined to be interviewed for this column. Other restaurateurs and small-business owners have told me privately they believe that misogyny, and perhaps low-key racism, helped fuel the backlash against her.

At least four popular Twin Cities restaurants — all owned by white men — carry foie gras on their menu. But duck activists remained obsessed with Kim.

Perhaps the general blowback is about more than Kim. Maybe it’s more about young people railing against capitalism and what they view as economic unfairness. Their anger is powering the rise of democratic socialist candidates, from Zohran Mamdani in New York to Omar Fateh here at home.

Capitalism has never had a worse image problem in our country, with only 42% of Democrats viewing it favorably, according to the latest Gallup poll. Two-thirds of Democrats have a positive perception of socialism. When young workers at Kim’s delivered a petition to unionize last year, it might have been their way of rejecting an economic system, even if it meant blowing up their boss.

“Equity” is in. The American dream is out. While Ann Kim is a successful business owner, we ought to remind ourselves that she is not Elon Musk.

Restaurateur Kim Bartmann, who also became a polarizing figure over labor issues, noted the irony about which bosses face the most scrutiny in her industry.

Restaurants typically operate on thin margins, anywhere from 0-15%, depending on the source — and the restaurant. Turnover among staff is rampant. Food prices have continued to soar. In Minneapolis, the minimum wage of $15.97 is several dollars an hour higher than in neighboring suburbs.

You can wholeheartedly support workers’ rights and still see the challenges of implementing a traditional union in this business. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the local Newspaper Guild and publicly supported unionizing at my former place of employment, MPR News.)

“Are there bad actors? Absolutely,” said Zimmern. “But for the vast majority of restaurants I’m aware of, owners care very deeply for their employees and are caught between a rock and hard place with disappearing margins. Mass unionization, as it exists, would put more independent restaurants out of business, and more people would be out of work.”

A perfect storm of factors crippled Kim’s. Construction crews tore up streets in Uptown, an already challenged area, and kept people at bay. Kim also stuck to a no-tipping model and a restaurant surcharge that most establishments phased out after the pandemic.

Restaurant owners say the surcharge, which is no longer allowed in Minnesota, helped them pay for things like health benefits, made the business more sustainable and boosted the wages of back-of-house staff, from cooks to dishwashers. But it often resulted in less pay for bartenders and servers who no longer took home tips.

“If we went to the tip model, we all would have been happy,” Boss said, adding that there would be no union if Kim would have reinstated the tip line.

Boss was rankled by what she called the lack of transparency by Kim’s management about where the surcharge was going. She also said the company started to hire servers at lower wages. When the union efforts went public, the restaurant stopped marketing itself on social media, which hurt business more, she said.

Union organizers talked about improving working conditions and the need for more predictable hours at Kim’s, but that rang hollow for Boss.

“I’ve worked in a handful of restaurants over the past 25 years, and this was one of the best-managed workplaces I’ve ever worked at. They bent over backwards for us,” said Boss. “People went on vacations for two months, or acted in a play, or taught, and they came back. [Managers] were flexible.”

Although Boss initially supported the organizing and wanted to have a voice in negotiations, she said she grew disheartened when many of her younger colleagues stopped doing their jobs once the unionization got under way.

In the end, it was not unionization or financial losses but a rent dispute that Kim cited for her reasons to close Young Joni in northeast Minneapolis. The building’s owner, Lander Group, sued her company in June, asking for $143,169 — plus late charges, accrued interest and other expenses — from Kim and Leifur. According to the lawsuit, the couple were interested in renewing the lease at a rate of $18 per square foot, while Lander suggested a market rate of $30 to $36 per square foot.

When she opened Young Joni, her third restaurant, Kim wasn’t afraid to invest in striking interior design to achieve her vision of hospitality, which she once described as warm, sophisticated, out of the ordinary and “a little sexy.” She took a chance on an underutilized patch of Northeast that has since blossomed into a white-hot restaurant row populated by places like Vinai, Oro by Nixta, Minari, Diane’s Place and Stargazer.

Young Joni, named the Star Tribune Restaurant of the Year in 2017, was a place you could celebrate first dates and anniversaries, moms’ nights out and visits from extended family. There are and will continue to be other special restaurants in Minneapolis, but it’s hard to imagine another one like Young Joni, which delivered dishes developed through Kim’s unique lens. The meals blended her Korean American heritage, her irreverence and sense of innovation. Roasted cauliflower and sweet potatoes were reinvented in her hearth.

We don’t know what’s next for Kim. She recently partnered with Target to offer her pizzas and Korean-inspired appetizers in the frozen food section. She still operates her first two restaurants, Pizzeria Lola and Hello Pizza.

Zimmern, who experienced his own annus horribilis after making a clumsy and culturally insensitive comment about local Chinese restaurants several years ago, said his situation was different from Kim’s. But he similarly felt the sting of public whiplash that unfolded at lightning speed, amplified by social media. It sent him on a year of “repair work,” he said.

When I interviewed Kim three years ago after she appeared in the Netflix series “Chef’s Table,” I found her to be open and gregarious. At the time, she told me that she realized her purpose in life was perhaps “not so much to inspire through my cooking, but to inspire transformation through living authentically.”

That she feels she cannot speak openly now says a lot about how far our culture has come to silencing an entrepreneur who doesn’t check every box of progressive politics in Minneapolis.

Ann Kim didn’t deserve this. She made the city more interesting, diverse and alive. With her voice fading away, one might argue that our community deserves better, too.

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