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www.groovekorea.com / April 2014 44 FOOD & DRInK edited by Josh Foreman (joshforeman@groovekorea.com) C hances are, if you’ve ever visit- ed High Street Market, you al- ready know the illustrious Mipa Lee. She’s most widely known as the brains and baker behind Alien’s Day Out, Seoul’s lead provisioner of sug- ary-sweet confections made without eggs, butter or milk. In short, she’s responsible for making Alien’s Day Out — both the blog and bakeshop — syn- onymous with vegan indulgence. For anyone walking the egg- and dairy-free trail in Seoul, Mipa’s a mammoth. To add to her list of professional accom- plishments, she’s now also the purveyor of PLANT, a studio/restaurant that’s been in the making for years. Born in Busan to missionary parents, her history is “a little bit muddled,” she says with a grin. She spent most of her childhood growing up in West Africa, both in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, eat- ing fried plantains, red-red and fufu, a traditional African concoction made of boiled and pounded cassava or yams. “I haven’t visited Ghana for a few years and I’m dying to go back. I miss the food so much. Filling, fatty, sticky, spicy ... it’s so delicious.” Mipa left Ghana for the U.S., where she enrolled in a studio art program at a small school in Pennsylvania. She re- turned to Korea in 2006, all the while wrestling with the philosophy behind her consumption of meat. She changed her ways. “After a few years as a veg- etarian, I made the full switch to ve- ganism in 2008 and haven’t looked back since,” she said. “Since I was in Korea, I thought it would be interesting to share my experiences. Back then, the movement was still pretty new, so I started blogging.” And that she did. She started Alien’s Day Out in April 2009. Its humble be- ginnings involved baking, baking some more, blogging about it and then re- peating the process. As her vegan bak- ing abilities developed, so did her blog’s following. Soon, people began emailing about where they could taste her cre- ations, and she saw an opportunity to start selling. “It took more than a year to get off the ground, but after the initial stag- es of development were over, I had to quit my job just to make time for all the baking.” She peddled her goodies to High Street Market and to Botton, a cute little coffee shop in the Noksa- pyeong neighborhood. She styled her own packaging, and completely took over the vegan baked goods market in Seoul without even realizing what had happened. “One day I suddenly saw ... there’s no way I can keep doing this out of my house!” She explains all this while wrapped in a flour-stained apron and pink T-shirt, tucked behind a table in what has be- A VEGAn LEADER BRAnCHEs OUT PLANT serves innovative vegan and vegetarian fare to Seoulites story by Shelley DeWees Photos by Shelley DeWees, Mipa Lee and Yona Koh