The entire fantasia is the fruit of a funky teaming between Papermoon owner Un Kim and designer David Briskie. Kim was an immigrant from South Korea who came to the US during the 1970s and found her fortune in the food industry. She cut her culinary teeth saving a struggling carryout in downtown Baltimore and a cafe near the University of Maryland hospital. In 1994, she opened the Papermoon—naming it for the 1973 Ryan and Tatum O’Neal film—and engaged Briskie to furnish its décor. Briskie was a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art who’d opened an event design company in Virginia. Now, spurred on by bizarre dreams that were eating his sleep, he turned the Papermoon into an alternate universe—a new-dimensional dining area over owing with dismembered mannequins, toy cars, and eclectic stuff that might have spilled pell-mell from a kid’s closet. The overall effect achieved something of the feel of a Hieronymus Bosch painting with fries.
“People need to have fun, no matter what age they may be,”Kim has often said.
