About Us & Contact Info
WE LOVE FOOD!
This journal relates our adventures in experiencing food in Korea, along with recipes for Korean food and tips for ex-pats living in Korea.
A LITTLE HISTORY
ZenKimchi was started in early 2004. The Food Journal came about because Joe McPherson wrote so much about food in his diary blog that it was becoming a food blog. At the time, there was only one English language food blog in Korea, the original Fatman Seoul, but Mr. Fatman stopped posting in 2005. Joe picked up the slack by creating the ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal in October 2005. ZenKimchi is now Korea’s longest running food blog.
Other Korean food blogs have come along to join us, and it’s a great community. ZenKimchi has been featured in The New York Times, Korean and international newspapers and magazines, all the major Korean TV stations, Lonely Planet and the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Through this site, we have also met some awesome people.
WHO WE ARE
Joe McPherson (Founding Editor) has lived in Korea since early 2004 and has forgotten how to use a fork. He is also dining editor for 10 Magazine and host of the SeoulPodcast. He comes from a food-obsessed family, where his first job, at twelve years-old, was to dress up in a Popeye costume for his dad’s Popeye’s Fried Chicken franchise. His brother Ben is an up-and-coming chef (now at The Grand Marlin in Florida) and is also a published food writer. Joe has worked in the food industry as a cook, bad waiter, slightly better waiter, barback, bartender (bartending school grad), pizza maker/driver, sandwich artist and oyster shucker. He also reads a smurfload of books on food to the point of obsession.
Eun Jeong Lee (Research, Attitude) trained really hard to be a lifelong Korean and has achieved phenomenal results. She speaks Korean well and likes kimchi. She also agrees that Korea has four distinct seasons. She’s the magic maker at ZenKimchi, finding and setting stuff up that we thought was not possible and we were told was not possible.
Tammy Quackenbush (Editor, San Francisco Bureau Chief) lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her love of Korean food started when she taught ESL in Chuncheon, Gangwon-do, back in 1996-1997. However, she didn’t become “famous” for her Korean cooking style until she started making cooking videos on YouTube as Koreanfornian Cooking in 2007 (had to put her college degree to use somehow). Her recipes and articles have been featured on Slice/Seriouseats.com, Foodbuzz, Korea.net and iFoodTV.com.
Shinshine (Editor, New York Bureau Chief) grew up in Seoul and has been living in the U.S. roughly the latter half+ of her life. She’s been living in New York since 2005. Having switched careers from finance to food, she is now a full-time restaurant cook in New York City after culinary school in 2008. Recently she started her food diary, www.shinshine.com, which is about three things in life she enjoys the most – food, Korea and New York.
Steve Ward (Videographer, Writer) has been living in Seoul for nearly five years now and has dabbled in many different hobbies and types of work in that time. He briefly became known as ‘SkinnySteve’ because of his mission to lose weight while working on the website SeoulSteves, but since SeoulSteves is now defunct, he’s now kinda-sorta skinny, and he’s really bad at making up nicknames for himself, he’s now ‘JustSteve.’ “Steve” also works just fine. SteveWard.TV is the homepage of his official online presence.
ChubbO Chubbington (Writer) has lived in Korea for about 2 years. She has been gifted with the ability to eat spicy food and not complain about it or sweat while doing so. She also teaches English in between meals. Her main dietary considerations consist of texture, texture, taste, and texture. It’s gotta feel right between the tongue and the teeth. She leaves the cooking to her Korean husband and focuses mainly on consumption. She knows Krispy Kreme is not one of the main food groups, but hopes to rectify this injustice in the future. She is currently living in Wonju and writes at Wonju Wife when she’s not stuffing her face.
Grace Meng (Writer) is a nonprofit consultant and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She was an immigration lawyer until a few years ago, when she ran away to Mexico to learn how to make mole negro and started blogging at One Fork, One Spoon. She is now writing a cookbook on Korean food with her good friend Diane Choo, which has given them the best excuse ever to take road trips around Korea eating all the way.
CONTACT US
We love hearing from readers, especially the ones who think the journal is the wittiest, most informative site on the Internets.
NOTE: Joe is not available for interviews, meetings or media projects unrelated to the upcoming Buddhist Temple Cuisine event in New York until October unless they can be handled over the phone or by email.