Photo Sets Off Skid Row Quest : Homeless: Market owner wants to give former employee a job after seeing newspaper picture of him eating a meal outside mission.

On Los Angeles’ Skid Row these days, Jimmy Smith and Charles Kim have something in common.

Smith is a homeless man who is walking the streets looking for a job. Kim is a man with a job walking the streets looking for Smith.

Kim has been searching since June 16, when he saw a Times photograph of Smith eating a Father’s Day dinner outside the Fred Jordan Mission.

Kim immediately recognized Smith as a cook who had worked for four years in Kim’s restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard.

“Jimmy is a good man. Healthy, honest, a good employee and a good cook” said Kim, 55, of Northridge. “I was in shock when I saw the picture. I took it to my wife and she couldn’t sleep after she saw it.”

The Bit ‘n Apple eatery near San Vicente Boulevard closed in March, said Kim. It was being operated by Kim’s brother-in-law when it shut down.

Linda Kim helped her husband prepare flyers. They reprinted the newspaper picture and listed Kim’s phone number next to the legend: “Looking For This Man, Jimmy Smith.”

Kim, who runs a market in Port Hueneme in Ventura County, has made four trips to downtown Skid Row since then to look for his friend and pass out flyers.

“I posted them at the Fred Jordan Mission and the Midnight Mission and put some of them on walls on the street. I gave one to a shoeshine parlor,” he said. But he has had no luck in finding Smith, who is about 45.

“No one’s said they’ve seen him,” said Robert Caldwell, a clerk at the Midnight Mission who put Kim’s poster on the bulletin board in the jampacked mission. “We’ll keep it up until he sees it.”

Said Lidia Flores, office manager for the Fred Jordan Mission: “We hope we find him. If he’s got a job waiting, we’d love to get him back in civilization.”

Photographer Marissa Roth said she chose Smith for her Father’s Day picture because he seemed to stand out from the hundreds of other homeless people gathered for the dinner.

“He seemed embarrassed to be there. It was very sad,” Roth said.

Kim said that when Smith was cooking at the Bit ‘n Apple he helped him rent a Koreatown apartment. He speculates that Smith was too embarrassed to call after the restaurant closed and he was left without a job or rent money.

“I have 40 employees now. I can squeeze him in, no problem,” Kim said. “We were like brothers. He’d do the same thing for me.”

Kim squinted down Main Street, hoping he would spot Smith in a throng of homeless people near the Union Rescue Mission.

“I want to find him and give him a better life,” he said.