By Kat Bryant

Grays Harbor News Group

The crew of the Samurai Sushi restaurant in Aberdeen personally handed out the fixings for more than 100 turkey dinners on Tuesday.

Owner Sun-il Kim, a native of Korea, has been doing this for local families in need every November since he opened the restaurant in 2016.

“Thanksgiving was never a thing for me growing up in Korea. We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving there,” he said. After he moved to the United States at age 17, “I saw that’s what people do here. But what if people can’t afford a $50 Thanksgiving dinner for their family? So I just thought, if I do this, somebody will have a nice dinner.”

Kim and his wife moved to Grays Harbor from Spokane in 2013, when Katherine landed a job as school counselor at McDermoth Elementary in Aberdeen.

He said they were a little worried about their decision initially. But over time, as they settled into the community and got to know the people here, they knew they were home. Katherine loved her job, and Kim did language translation work via email.

About a year after their son Milo was born, Kim decided it was time to put his business degree to good use. After much research, he opened Samurai Sushi in January 2016 — and, with some fine-tuning, business has remained fairly steady since Day One.

Part of his original business plan was to give back to his adopted community in some way.

“I feel welcome in this town. Even coming from outside, I feel this is a lot like my hometown,” he said. “With my wife liking her job here, and we had our son here, it seems everything’s kind of special here. So I thought, you know what? I want to do something special here too.”

He and Katherine had both noticed the preponderance of poverty in Aberdeen, so he delved into that.

Many articles he found online generally blamed it on drug use, but as a resident he had learned there was more to it than that. “What they write is very different from what I feel about the town,” he said. So he resolved to help as much as he was able.

“The first year was hard, because we were still paying off debts from opening the business,” he said. “I talked to my team here, and I talked to my wife about it. She said, ‘Sun, you don’t have to push it. You could start this next year.’ But I told her: ‘I just want to try it.’”

He decided to provide Thanksgiving dinners to 50 families that year. He considered teaming up with local schools or charity organizations, but in the end he chose to do it through his restaurant so he could interact with people face-to-face. He planned to distribute bundles of food containing a 10-pound turkey, a 3-pound bag of potatoes, powdered gravy and stuffing mix.

“I just posted it on Facebook, and I was surprised by how many shares we got. And believe it or not, we got just 50 families that signed up — perfect,” he said. “So I think: ‘We have some synergy here. Maybe next year I’ll try a little more.’”

In 2017, he distributed bundles of food to 80 families, and again it worked out perfectly. Last year, he increased it to 100 — but because word got out, the sign-up sheet was full 11 days before Thanksgiving.

“It was very hard for us to turn people away,” said Kim. “In the end, I started writing the names down, and I called them when I had 10 more to give.”

He said some customers and other local businesses have reached out to him asking if they could donate toward the effort. He said he’d take them up on their offers if more people signed up than he could accommodate.

This year, he bought 110 bundles.

“I would like to do more, but I’m stuck with one small business. It’s not like it’s always growing,” he said. Still, he intends to do as much as he can each year — and, as he points out, he’s got a really big freezer to hold all those turkeys.

His employees also get involved in the effort. Some of their children come in on the day of distribution to help people carry their bundles out.

Even some families outside the area are benefiting from Kim’s efforts. He said a former Harborite got wind of his donations via Facebook and is paying it forward in Yakima, where she operates a small business now.

She told Kim she’d seen his post and contacted someone she knew who needed help, and that family of three signed up for one of his bundles last year.

“Since you helped them, I’m going to help three families in Yakima,” she told him via Facebook messaging.

“Stuff like that makes everything worth it,” he said. “It just makes me feel good.”