The moment Jaehyun Sim decided to become a sommelier was not the one you might expect. There was no formative bottle of Burgundy at the family table, nor a revelatory glass poured by a mentor with impeccable taste. Instead, during his sommelier training, Sim watched his peers develop their palates with enthusiasm while he confronted a more complicated problem. He cannot easily consume alcohol.“Watching colleagues discuss the nuances of wine late into the night, I naturally began to question whether I could realistically sustain a career as a sommelier,” he recalled.The answer was not to drink more. Sim founded Havn – a non-alcoholic botanical beverage label built around carefully sourced Korean ingredients – not as a compromise, but as an argument that what accompanies serious food can be complex, balanced and free of alcohol.
Havn uses Korean herbs, teas and botanicals to create non-alcoholic beverages with the structure and balance expected of fine dining pairings. (Photo: Havn)
His route into beverages began in the kitchen, as a line cook at La Main de Chef in Gangnam, before a head chef’s recommendation moved him front-of-house and led him to wine. It was not, as it turned out, out of a love of drinking, but from the recognition that to elevate a dining experience, he had to understand what sat alongside the food in the glass.During sommelier training, however, the physical barrier became clear. His peers were developing their palates the time-honoured way. Sim had to work from a different vantage point.The answer began to take shape at Evett, Joseph Lidgerwood’s Michelin-starred restaurant in Seoul. What Sim encountered there changed his understanding of what a non-alcoholic pairing could be. Lidgerwood’s kitchen was not treating teetotallers as an afterthought. It was running a fully realised non-alcoholic pairing programme with the rigour of a serious wine list: Green juices pressed from perilla leaves, liquids carbonated with whey left over from cheese-making to build creamy texture and acidity, and a “Korean Cola” assembled from traditional medicinal herbs.“These were not mere substitutes for alcohol,” Sim said. “They were independent components of the dining experience with their own structure and balance.”Having found his direction, he set his sights on Copenhagen.THE DANISH INTERLUDE
