Briana Kim Is Back
At her new restaurant in Ottawa, Briana Kim is fermenting magic
Briana Kim is at last opening Antheia, the keenly anticipated successor to her Ottawa restaurant, Alice, which would have ranked 20th on the Canada’s 100 Best list in 2024 had she not shuttered it this past January. “What we learned at Alice,” Kim says, “is that, without creating a very controlled environment such as we now have at the new restaurant, it’s hard to expand what we can do with fermentation.”
She was also already planning then for Antheia, a fermentation research and development laboratory-cum-restaurant with a 12-seat tasting bar and just two tables, which opens its doors on December 5th. While it was being built, an ongoing series of inspiring exchanges with the famed Danish chef René Redzepi led Kim to the ultimate research gig – an invitation to travel to Copenhagen’s Noma to create new flavours and textures and share her perspective on the future of fermentation.
“[Antheia is] the first restaurant lab of its kind in the country and pushes the boundaries of what we can do in a Canadian context,” Kim notes. For her equipment, a cedar walk-in fermentation incubator built by Ottawa craftsman Kamran Hashemi, is complemented by traditional amphorae and earthenware fermentation vessels called onggi, bulbous tapered clay pots that originated in Korea around 4000 to 5000 BCE. “The containers remind us of how cultures across time found ways to preserve and elevate food,” Kim says. “At Antheia, those traditions meet modern techniques to create flavours that feel both timeless and new.”
Kim works with various cultures inoculated into different Canadian grains to create the misos, garums and shoyus that provide the foundation for the dishes on the restaurant’s vegetarian tasting menu, which follows a fermentation schedule rather than ingredient seasonality. The incubator is not visible, but a chef’s counter offers diners a view of cooks at work in the kitchen.
“Antheia is about capturing a moment in time and transforming it into something lasting, something you can taste months, or even years, later. That’s the magic I want people to experience here.”
Photo: Jamie Kronick
Photo: Jamie Kronick
Photo: Jamie Kronick
Photo: Jamie Kronick
– Andrew Coppolino