Culinary

Sky Haneul Kim ’14 Wins James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Northeast

Judy Hill
21 July 2025

With seven alumni named as finalists, JWU was well represented in this year’s James Beard Foundation Awards. In the Best Chef: Northeast category alone, three former Wildcats — Derek Wagner ’99, Brian Lewis ’89 and Sky Haneul Kim ’14 — made it to the final round. It was Chef Kim, though, who ultimately claimed the award for her cooking at Gift Horse, a raw bar and seafood restaurant in Providence.

Kim accepted her medal onstage at the June 16 award ceremony in Chicago with her husband, Chris Pfail ’13, who was also nominated as part of the team at Oberlin (co-owned by JWU alumni Bethany Caliaro ’15 and Benjamin Sukle ’08), which was a finalist for Outstanding Restaurant. Caliaro and Sukle opened Gift Horse about two years ago in the space next to Oberlin on Westminster Street.

Kim, who grew up in South Korea and spent several years working in restaurants in New York City and Portland, Oregon, before returning to Rhode Island, says winning the award was the fulfillment of a long-held aspiration. “If you’re in this industry, just being a semifinalist or finalist is everybody’s dream,” she says, “so this experience is just unreal.”

Sky Haneul Kim smiles with her James Beard award for Best Chef: Northeast at Gift Horse.

The dishes that secured the win for Kim represent an artful amalgam of the flavors of her native Korea merged with fresh, locally sourced ingredients from Rhode Island. Think fried rice cakes with braised whelk, mozzarella and kimchi cream or smoked scallops in a split-top brioche with cilantro mayo and pickles.

“I love to do something that brings back memories,” says Kim, who grew up eating food cooked by her grandma, including a squash soup that remains the best she has ever eaten. When she began planning the menu for Gift Horse with Sukle, he gave her the freedom to “just cook whatever you want to eat.” That translated to Korean-infused creations where Kim says she will “bring back a memory and then create something new.”

Korean fusion is hard, she says, because the base flavors are strong and in order to be authentic should stay intact. “I don’t touch the base,” she says, “but I play with what’s around it.” For a cold noodle dish called naengmyeon currently on the menu that means adding salted squid, which she says would never be eaten with the noodles in Korea.

Sky Haneul Kim prepares pastry dough at Gift Horse.

Kim also likes introducing diners to underrated ingredients such as skate. “I was surprised to hear that a lot of people here use skate as bait. In Korea you can hardly ever find it and it’s a very expensive fish.”

If guests leave Gift Horse thinking the food was “weird,” that’s a good thing, says Kim. “It makes me feel really good when guests say that word. It means they’ve never had it before, and in that way weird is good.”

Kim credits her time at Johnson & Wales with giving her a good grounding in basic, foundational culinary skills such as knifework and also with learning how to work with teams and with people from different cultures and countries.

Providence has always been a nurturing city for chefs, she says, and the food scene continues to grow because diners are willing to try something new and fresh ingredients are easy to source locally. “Chefs are coming here or returning here because they hear so many good things about Providence and it’s so easy to get great seafood, which is really a pleasant thing for us.”

Will winning the award change the way she approaches her cooking? Not at all, says Kim. “It might change the number of people we get coming into the restaurant every day, but I’ll just keep doing whatever I did before. Nothing changes.”