Less than a year ago, restaurateur, fiction writer, and playwright Sang Kim opened the Windup Bird Cafe (named after Haruki Murakami’s novel The Windup Bird Chronicle), which provides extensive literary programming to Torontonian foodie-literati. The restaurant has already seen great success, with its events for the year completely sold out.

The events include book launches; the Best Canadian Poetry Reading Series; Parental Guidance Not Required readings by writers aged 12-18; Writes of Passage, which involve collaborations between writers 65 years and older and writers 25 and younger; Kid-Chen Confidential, where kids design recipes for future publication in a cookbook; and Cook/Book interviews, where authors cook a dish of their choice while Kim interviews them about their books.

In regards to his inspiration to open a literary-themed restaurant, Kim said, “I was getting really sick and tired of just opening restaurants for the sake of making business with food and beverage. I’ve always had the idea of taking a restaurant format and really expressing all my passions, which include not only literature, but the work I do [in the areas of] childhood poverty and hunger and the culinary arts.”

The cafe has so far hosted writers such as Canadian poet laureate George Eliot Clarke, Anne Michaels, Greg Gatenby, and others, with future events to come.

Watch Kim’s TEDx talk for the bigger story behind his founding of the restaurant.
 

Source: Quill & Quire