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The history behind Kimski is sweet. The idea is a Korean-Polish fast food joint attached to Maria’s Community Bar, focusing on tapas-style street food. Maria Marszewski’s children grew up on Korean and Polish food and the entire establishment - Maria’s Packaged Goods, the Community Bar, and Kimski is their love story, their family history, and their way of giving back to their community in Bridgeport. I especially love this concept because it offers the opportunity to implement some elements of Chicago-style barbecue which is pretty looked down on in the broader bbq landscape (we are locked in hard on the Tendernism Era).
I don’t even know where to begin with my disappointment. I took my parents here to watch the World Cup match between Korea and Mexico last night. A Korean restaurant attached to the side of a bar in an Asian/Hispanic neighborhood? Given my parents’ history, I thought it was perfect and a great way to respect the Spanish-speaking background they grew up in while spending time with the diverse Korean-American community that’s been blooming in Chicagoland recently.
It was busy. You’d think that Kimski, aware of this World Cup watch party event at such a fitting location, would add another employee to that shift. Hell, they probably needed two or three more manning the kitchen. Or you’d think the person behind Kimski would be there instead if they chose not to add the extra manpower. To say the service was awful doesn’t give credence to Merriam-Webster’s definition of “awful”. You’d think that seeing a blonde dude in the kitchen with mini golden forks for earrings would either 1) mean that he’s decent at cooking, at a place where more than half of the menu is fried food, or 2) that they’d have forks available for us to use…. but apparently his were the only forks in the building.
But as it turns out, thinking is a fundamental fallacy at Kimski, and it goes hand-in-hand there with a lack of effort or human decency. The two people actually working the kitchen would move around extremely slowly, spend most of the time looking at the line growing out the door, and taking pictures. They had a negative sense of urgency, which I didn’t know was possible until last night. My dad and I were lucky at first, or so we thought - we got in line when it was still relatively short (like 6-8 people ahead of us) but we had to wait for FORTY MINUTES. Not to get our food, but just to order. At a shop that sells hot dogs with kimchi, crinkle-cut fries, and chicken sandos. Seriously, what are they doing back there? How do you burn fried chicken that badly, what did the poor thing ever do to you? But it’s not even just that. Every so often, a mistake can happen if you’re pushing out fifty orders an hour. How do you have so little respect for another human being that you choose to serve chicken that’s so clearly inedible? Not just bad - literally inedible. If a prison served it the ACLU would be on the case immediately. If you witnessed a parent serving that to their child it’d be inhumane not to call CPS. It’s that bad. All this while finishing 10 orders an hour.
I love this community, I love food that pays homage to peoples’ different backgrounds and cultures. But trying to enjoy Kimski’s was like loving the idea of love. I can’t blame it solely on the food, because I wasn’t able to have much of it. But the lack of effort, human decency, and respect is what will keep me away from Kimski for a very long time. Which is such a shame because if you do even the tiniest amount of research on Maria Marszewski, you’d learn that she has built her reputation on being hardworking and resilient, on being fearless during the 90s when her corner was on the border of a gang war, and on being inclusive and matronly to everyone around her since 1986. The current experience at Kimski is an incredibly pitiful and damaging reflection of that reputation and I wish the current staff would take that more seriously. Forget customer service. You simply cannot treat people this way.
2/30. Take your worst enemy here
