What's up, guys? Leslie Robbins here for Young Hollywood, coming to you from Netflix Bites, a pop-up restaurant here in Los Angeles that features your favorite foods from your favorite Netflix chefs. And right now I'm going in the kitchen with pizza guru Ann Kim.

We are inside Netflix Bites with Chef Ann Kim. Welcome to your home away from home.

Thank you for having us. This is really exciting for us.

Oh, thank you. Thanks for joining me in Sunny LA. Yeah, it's so fun to be here. It's uh, we're closing on like two more weeks, and so it's really exciting to see all these different guests come through and be able to meet with people who have seen me on Netflix and actually get to eat the food that they've seen on the show and I get to interact with them. So it's been great.

Okay, I'm going to fan girl for a second. I, I watched your episode Chef's Table Pizza and I, I love you. Like, I was inspired by you. Your story's amazing. So talk about your journey from then to now. I mean, South Korea, Minnesota, New York, my hometown. I felt the love for the city. Oh yeah. I mean, I was like, "Yes," and, "Yes," and, "Yes." Oh. So you understood. I do. Talk about it for me.

Yeah, well, in a condensed version, I'm an immigrant born in Busan, South Korea, came to the United States when I was about five years old with my family. And we happened to settle in Minnesota because that's where we had family. And I was raised there, grew up there. I kind of consider myself a Midwestern girl, a Korean-American Midwestern girl. Went to college in New York and that's where I got my grit and persistence and hustle. And the love for pizza. I mean, I pretty much had a slice once a week when I was out there and moved back to Minnesota and really didn't get into the business till quite later in life. I tried a bunch of different things. I even pursued the theater and made that a career for eight years.

You're good on stage.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I always say that being in the theater was my education for running restaurants. I just kind of left one stage for another one. You know, you know, you never know what you're going to get. I mean, it really is, every day is a little different. And so that was my preparatory school for opening restaurants. And 13 years ago, I opened my first restaurant Pizzeria Lola, and then fast forward to today and all of these things that I feel so blessed and grateful to have um, experienced in this short period of time. And um, here I am in LA getting to make a few of our specialty pizzas and delivering them to the West Coast. All of you.

Yeah. I mean, it's really exciting. But the funny thing about your story is like you mentioned on your show, no one would think you're going to be really good at making pizza. And you, you were honest in that you weren't good at first. You're trying to mix what you know with pizza because you love pizza and you experimented, but somehow you like found the lightning in a bottle.

We have to start somewhere, right? Nobody is born an expert at anything, right? And I'm not necessarily your face of pizza. You wouldn't look at me and say, "Oh, that woman, she must be an incredible pizza maker." But honestly, it's just for me, I love craft. I love to just focus, hone in on one thing and try and get better at it every day. And to me, pizza is a craft and it's always going to be different. And I said the day that I stop learning is the day that I hang up my apron and I call it quits. I find it really fun to improve and make, you know, different things with the pizza dough. But it's that New York when I was in New York and experienced a slice for the first time and sort of that idea of community in a restaurant. I wanted that. I wanted to create that. I envision that for my first restaurant and here I am.

Wait, was it really your first ever slice of pizza?

Uh, not my first, I was like, yeah, my first, you know, slice that you fold, you know, you don't use a fork and knife. Remember, I'm a, you gotta be able to hold it and, you know, it's gotta fold over and it's gotta be crisp. Right. So yeah, that was my first experience of, "Wow, this is what a slice can taste like."

With the energy. And I love how you kind of talked about the energy on the street. That's kind of what pizza is. It's the energy, right?

It is. It brings people together. I mean, don't trust anybody who doesn't love pizza, right? Whether you're young or old or whoever you are, we can all come together over a slice.

Okay, this is appealing. It's gorgeous. Can you show me around the restaurant?

Yes, of course. Let's go.

Yeah. Okay, chef, walking through this space. There are beautiful shots of all the chefs on the wall. Art, gorgeous. There you are. Looking beautiful.

Yeah, there I am, next to Chef Curtis Stone. Hi, Curtis. No, this was really great. Like, um, when Netflix took over uh, this patio space, they really wanted to create a different experience, colorful, bright, happy. And they had an artist paint portraits of us. That's a part of the art throughout the restaurant and I think it's really fun and special, especially for me. You can look at us. Unlike a lot of traditional chefs who went to culinary school or really worked uh, in kitchens and honed their skill, I never worked in a restaurant. Ever before I opened my first restaurant. And so really where I learned how to cook and get inspired was by my maternal grandmother and my mother. They were just cooks who never followed a recipe and I was always at their hip when they were cooking and tasting and they're the ones that inspired um, my palate and who I am today as a chef.

And what I love, uh, you mentioned how your dad loves the uh, soft serve vanilla and you serve that in your restaurant with the the gourmet olive oil on top and you give it to him. I mean, that's just so beautiful. Your family is never far from your restaurants.

No. As a matter of fact, they'll often do drive-bys just to make sure there are people waiting to get in. They just want to make sure there's butts in seats. Yeah. Still. Yeah, no, they'll call me and they'll say, "Yeah, it was busy there." I was like, "How'd you know?" "We drove by." So they're always looking, they're always looking over, you know, making sure I'm doing well and, you know, it was hard because originally I didn't have their support. But now to see that they're really proud of me and to be able to share, you know, sort of the joy that we're bringing to our community and now sort of around the world, means a lot to me.

So what kind of message would you pass on to young chefs maybe that don't have the support similar to your family, it has to be a real nine-to-five job on paper, it looks real, but it's not their passion.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to lie or sugarcoat it, it's hard. This profession is not easy. Um, you're going to have to put a lot of work and effort into it, but if the passion is there, if this is something that brings you joy, go for it. You know, just know that you got to have grit, you got to have hustle, you have to work hard. But other than that, like, if you've got a vision and a goal, just go for it. Yeah.