[News Culture] One starts the day in a market, choosing ingredients before the first customer arrives. The other moves between rehearsal rooms, festival stages and concert halls, checking everything from choreography to sightlines.
Their workplaces could hardly be more different, but the Oct. 3 episode of EBS1’s “Extreme JOB” places chef Mi-ryung Kim and singer Yong-pil Kim side by side to look at the work that happens long before a meal is served or a performance begins.
Mi-ryung Kim has spent more than 38 years behind the counter of a noodle shop, where the day can mean preparing close to 1,000 bowls.
Her routine begins at the market. Kim selects ingredients herself each morning, maintaining a long-standing preference for domestic produce and checking even the smaller components that go into a bowl of noodles.
The shop is best known for Andong-style noodles made from dough combining soybean powder and wheat flour in equal proportions. The mixture gives the noodles a distinctive texture and nutty flavor, and decades of repeat customers have turned the dish into the restaurant’s signature.
Once Kim returns from the market, the pace picks up quickly. Broth has to be prepared, vegetables cut and fresh geotjeori kimchi made for the table. During peak hours, boiling noodles, assembling bowls and keeping the dining room moving all happen at once.
The work has left its mark physically. Kim deals with chronic back pain after years spent standing in the kitchen, while her husband, who works alongside her, has endured burns and shoulder problems.
Still, much of what keeps the restaurant going is personal rather than procedural. Kim greets customers who have been coming for decades, explains to first-time overseas visitors how to eat the noodles and often receives guests dressed in hanbok, treating the restaurant as something more than a place to turn over tables.
The repetition is relentless: shopping, prep, broth, dough, service and cleanup, then the same cycle again the next day. What changes is the person sitting down to eat.
Yong-pil Kim’s version of repetition plays out onstage.
Autumn brings a packed schedule of festivals and performances across the country, and Kim, who spent 26 years working as an announcer before beginning a second career as a singer, has become deeply involved in the details surrounding each appearance.
Wardrobe is one of the first things he checks. Kim looks over his own stage clothes down to individual buttons, then turns his attention to the dancers’ outfits and movement so the visual flow of the performance stays consistent.
Concert preparation demands even more.
For an upcoming show combining music with theatrical elements, Kim has to learn not only the songs but also stage movement, entrances and transitions. Choreography remains one of the harder parts of the process. Without a background in professional dance, he works through unfamiliar movements repeatedly until they feel natural enough to perform while singing.
That repetition also becomes a test of stamina. Learning steps is one thing; delivering them while maintaining vocals across a full performance is another.
Preparation continues even after rehearsal ends. The day before a show, Kim sits in the audience and studies the stage from the spectator’s perspective, looking for obstructed views and checking whether movements remain visible from different seats.
That habit reflects how broadly he defines performance. For Kim, the work does not begin when the lights come up, and it does not belong only to the person holding the microphone.
His fans are part of that ecosystem as well.
Some arrive at venues before the singer himself, organizing support materials that they have funded together. Others fit concerts around work schedules, take vacation days or grab quick meals on the way so they can be there when the show begins.
Their effort has become another reason Kim continues to obsess over preparation. After spending much of his career in broadcasting, he is still relatively new to life as a touring singer, and much of the episode’s appeal lies in watching him learn the mechanics of performance from the inside.
The kitchen and the stage share little on the surface, but “Extreme JOB” finds a clear connection between them.
Mi-ryung Kim’s customers see a finished bowl. Yong-pil Kim’s audience sees a finished show. What disappears from view are the market trips, aching backs, hours of choreography, costume checks and empty-auditorium rehearsals that make those moments possible.
The episode stays with that unseen work. A meal that takes minutes to eat and a performance that lasts only a few hours are both built on repetition — thousands of small decisions made before anyone else arrives.
EBS1’s “Extreme JOB,” featuring chef Mi-ryung Kim and singer Yong-pil Kim, airs Saturday, Oct. 3 at 9:05 p.m. KST.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
Copyright ⓒ 뉴스컬처 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지
