Hanna Mi Kim has lived many lives — the Korean-born artist, 46, was a yoga teacher, a Korean beauty products distributor, a PR company owner, and even the editor-in-chief and photographer for a Singapore-based K-lifestyle magazine called Korean World. These days, the energetic lady boss is busy with her art and running her three-month-old eatery called Kong Cafe at King Albert Park in Bukit Timah.

“I [want to] do everything before I get too old. Cafes are not only owned by young people,” Hanna jokes to 8days.sg. In 2011, she also opened a tiny cafe called Coffeesmith (no relation to the Korean coffee chain) at the OUE Link bridge. “It was one of the smallest indie cafes in Singapore at 240 sqft,” she recalls. “I sold it off in 2013 ’cos I had to take care of my kids. But [I opened another cafe ’cos] they’re grown up now. I enjoy the work ’cos my customers are extremely loyal. Recently, one of my old Coffeesmith customers flew in from Brazil and he came here [to Kong Cafe].”

Hanna was living in Hong Kong with her Australian husband, who’s in the consultancy business, and their two kids before they uprooted to Singapore in 2006. “We felt Singapore was better,” she says. The family holds PR citizenship here. Hanna raves to us about her love for the local school system — her daughter, now 18, is currently studying at SOTA while her son, now 19, is a national canoeing athlete serving National Service. She muses, “As long as you’re not too competitive, the schools here are very good. They are very responsible and give good guidelines. In Korea, if you want to send your children to art school, you have to go through private exams and polish them with hours of art tuition. Here, everyone has a chance to become an artist. [Singapore] is very open to raw talent.”

Hanna herself became a full-time artist some six years ago, and rented a studio at Binjai Park before she gave up the space to open Kong Cafe. “I started painting when I got some hand-me-down sketchbooks from my daughter,” she shares. Her avant-garde artwork, which she calls “my babies”, hangs on the cafe’s walls. You can even buy the paintings on the spot if you fancy ’em (prices start from $280 to $3,800). “I do a lot of dansaekhwa (a South Korean art movement characterised by a monochromatic, minimalist painting technique),” she says. “I paint intensively. I would paint through the night. I’ve a lot of passions in life to paint!”

Kong Cafe may not be as hipster or quirky as the cafes you’d find in Seoul, but the very spacious 40-seater is comfy and tastefully decorated with Hanna’s art and lovingly-tended potted plants. Hanna explains that she named her cafe ‘Kong’ after the Korean word for beans. “It’s the foundation of good coffee, and soya bean and chilli paste in Korea,” she adds.

The cafe offers standard Western-style hipster brunch like Scrambled Eggs on Sourdough Toast ($13.50) and a Breakfast Burger ($17) with potato flour buns, sausage, bacon and an egg. But it’s Hanna’s Korean-inflected menu items that intrigue us, dishes like honey butter waffles with Korean fried chicken wings, bulgogi pesto pizza and rabokki, a popular spicy Korean street snack which combines ramyeon noodles and tteokbokki (Korean rice cakes).

“I was originally from Daegu (in South Korea). We’re known for everything spicy,” Hanna declares. But she says her menu was a lot ‘cleaner’ when she first opened her cafe: “I still do yoga and wanted to reflect my lifestyle, so initially I had a lot of health-conscious food. But I shifted to comfort food ’cos I saw my waffles and fried chicken selling very well. Even my kids wanted comfort food on weekends (laughs).” A self-taught cook, she preps the nosh in-house with a small team of staff.

Literally a platter of 10 fried chicken wings in your choice of a Honey Butter or Spicy & Sticky sauce. If you want both flavours (called ‘Ban Ban’, or half-half), you’d have to order 20 wings ($38) as the sauces are prepped in larger quantities. But for illustration’s sake, 8days.sg specially ordered 10 ‘Ban Ban’ wings. It’s ridiculously easy to finish; the succulent chicken wings are fried to a perfectly crispy finish, and slathered with an umami and sweet-savoury honey butter sauce, which Hanna spikes with garlic for extra flavour. The spicy wings are just as good, drenched in a piquant, fiery chilli sauce with soy sauce, sugar, cumin and garlic. Drop by in the evening, and you can order beer or peach soju to go with these tasty wings. “We Koreans eat chicken with beer, it’s the in thing,” laughs Hanna.

This quintessentially Korean waffle comes with three of the same excellent fried honey butter wings mentioned above, and may be one of the best savoury waffles we’ve tasted in Singapore so far. “The recipe for this is a bit like making soufflés [where whipped egg whites are added],” Hanna reveals. The waffle boasts an eggy, delicately crispy crust with an unusually light and fluffy centre. It would also go well with a scoop of vanilla ice cream ($12), but we much prefer this unique savoury-sweet combination where we drizzle the waffle with unabashedly garlicky honey butter sauce (the honey and melted butter blend is loaded with so much chopped garlic, we almost couldn’t get the sauce to flow). More, please.

Does bulgogi (marinated barbecued beef) go with pesto and cheese on a pizza base? “Spontaneous” cook Hanna thinks so. Surprisingly, our made-from-scratch pie is very tasty. It’s almost a Korean-fied pizza margherita, with a pleasing combination of earthy basil pesto, gooey melted mozzarella cheese and juicy, umami soy-spiked beef on a thin crispy crust balanced with some mild heat from chilli flakes.

Hanna’s ode to Singaporean Hainanese chicken rice is more like a mod grain bowl. Instead of steamed or roasted chicken, this bowl comes with a piece of crunchy, juicy fried chicken thigh, edamame, mayo-topped cabbages, cucumbers and ketchup-infused chilli sauce. It’s clean-tasting and healthy-ish (except for the fried chicken) and makes for a decent meal by itself, but we prefer to be bad and splurge all our calories on the more satisfying, sinful stuff like the Honey Butter Waffle instead.

This is a Korean rabokki with ramyeon and tteokbokki (hence its portmanteau name, spelled ‘Rara Bok Yi’ here), served in the saucepan it’s cooked in. There’s a lot going on in the pan; a slab of instant ramyeon (Korean ramen), tteokbokki (Korean rice cakes), mussels, thin slices of Korean fish cake and mozzarella cheese. The ingredients simmer in a feisty red chilli paste broth, which Hanna riffs with South Asian-style spices like turmeric and cumin. It’s too carb-heavy and spicy for chilli wimps like us, though folks who like Korean army stew might appreciate this. You can also top up and add Chicken Katsu ($4), Boiled Egg ($2.50) and Sausage ($3.50).

The cafe serves a small selection of house-made cakes with the usual suspects like Red Velvet, with a couple more special picks like this very on-trend Basque burnt cheesecake. The batter is deliberately cooked at high heat till the top is burnt and sunken and the insides oozy. We usually prefer it to the more jelak New York-style cheesecake, but Kong Cafe’s version is too firm for our liking.

This house-baked cake is almost as chio as a K-pop idol. It looks like Neapolitan ice cream, but this slice has a trinity of a chewy brownie-like chocolate base and dense strawberry butter cake topped with light vanilla cream. It’s like eating three desserts with three different textures, though they go well together and are not too sweet. Fun and yummy. Pair your dessert with a cup of Cappuccino ($6), brewed by an in-house barista with chocolatey Brazilian and Sumatran beans that impart a distinctive butter cookie-like fragrance when milk is added.

This under-the-radar cafe deserves more attention for its yummy Korean fusion brunch fare. It’s also a great spot to grab a coffee and chat with Kong’s owner-artist Hanna if you’re into art. In fact, the bright, spacious eatery has kinda reignited that long-faded spark we once had for #cafehopping.

#01-11, 896 Dunearn Rd, S589472 (beside King Albert Park MRT station’s Exit B). Open daily, Mon-Wed 8am-6pm; Thurs & Fri 8am-10pm; Sat & Sun 9am-10pm. www.kong.cafe.

PHOTOS: KELVIN CHIA