Rebirth of a Restaurant: In Search of Our Second Home, Part I

The first installment of a BTS look at the re-opening of our restaurant, baroo

Thank you so much to all of the new subscribers who’ve signed up for Sook! Most of you are old friends and family— and thank goodness for true friendship and family, otherwise I would be writing into a void! This week’s newsletter is the first installment of a series I’m calling Rebirth of a Restaurant where I’ll be sharing stories about reopening our old restaurant, baroo, in these hilarious times. This series will be part of the paid subscription eventually, I imagine. We’re thinking of the paid subscription as a way to support not just my writing, but also our restaurant, when I start differentiating between free and paid subscriptions. So for stories from our restaurant life, and my occasional rants, please think about a paid subscription whenever that day comes. For now, I’m just grateful you’re here!

(photo of old baroo in 2018 right before we closed, by Elizabeth Lippman for The NY Times)

As my friends and family, you likely know that Kwang and I have been working on reopening baroo since it closed in October 2018. It’s been almost four and a half years since we began looking for a new location. I cannot believe that it’s been that long, those years passed by so quickly for us. In between, there was a marriage, a baby, a pandemic, a pop-up and another restaurant, Shiku. So, we’ve been keeping ourselves reasonably busy, but we were always working on baroo. Baroo was always present for us, alive, waiting in the wings, waiting for the right moment to step back out onto the stage.

Now that a recession is looming and inflation and restaurant costs have spiraled out of control, is this the perfect moment we have been waiting for to reopen baroo? Hardly! But it’s happening, and Kwang and I cannot wait. This week, after more than four years of searching for a location for new baroo, we finally signed a lease! It doesn’t quite feel real since we have been looking for so long. But we have keys, and every day this week, we have been in the new space starting to settle into what will be our second home.

Since we now have a signed lease, I thought I would share a peek into what it’s like to look for a restaurant location in LA as a tiny, independent business. Spoiler alert: it’s kind of a nightmare! But with each space we saw, it was fun to imagine inhabiting it and dreaming about what baroo would be like if we chose (or were chosen for) that space. Because with each different space, baroo could have gone in a completely different direction, have a different vibe and live a wholly different life.

So, first off, these were the general parameters of our search. It must be cheap to open. The end. That’s it. We don’t have money to build out a restaurant from scratch or even redo a dining room in any significant way or buy expensive kitchen equipment. We don’t have money to pay “key money,” which is the amount an existing restaurant often asks for their fixtures and equipment and to recoup what they spent themselves on building out their place. And as the pandemic and its aftermath have made the restaurant business more and more trying, our budget has only tightened even more.

With that simple backdrop, here are the highlights of the spaces that could have been, where baroo could have lived a much different life than what it will have now.

Late 2018-early 2019 – East Hollywood Industrial Loft Paradise

As my friends know, I love a good industrial warehouse. I settled in DUMBO when I lived in New York at the turn of the century (do people call the early 2000s that?). And in Hong Kong, I was lucky to be part of the creative hub that is the Chai Wan Industrial City and its neighbours. So when a baroo customer showed us his gorgeous, slightly crumbly warehouse not far from old baroo, I fell in love. “Don’t fall in love with a space,” Kwang warns me anytime I rave about space. But I do every time anyway. Warehouse-height ceilings, wooden beams racked across the ceiling, an expansive dusty skylight, exposed brick walls, pockmarked concrete floors. This space had character, a soul.

I spent time visiting with the owner and his girlfriend who used the warehouse as her painting studio. Her large-scale canvases were propped up all over the warehouse and I could imagine baroo here. But the brick walls would need to be repaired. And the ceiling beams would need to be covered for the kitchen. And we would need to build a grease trap which is horrifically expensive. And we would need to put in the plumbing. And oh, we would need to get the power company to build a new power line for the space. These would be just the basics to start thinking about a restaurant actually functioning there.

The owner thought the space would need about US$850,000 to open, which he didn’t have and we didn’t have. So we said goodbye to this beautiful warehouse and any empty shell at all and focused on second generation restaurants where we didn’t have to spend money on the basic foundations of a restaurant.

2019 – Silver Lake Hole-in-the-Wall

The thing about looking at second generation restaurant spaces is that there is often a palpable air of disappointment when walking through. You can feel the hopes that the owner and chefs had for the space in little details you spy like a vase of dusty, fake flowers by the cash register. You see the persistence and a little desperation starting to seep through in hand-scrawled signs proclaiming happy hour specials hung in the windows. I think just once in four and a half years, a restaurant we toured was closing or had closed because the owners retired contentedly. Usually, the fact that we are in this space as prospective tenants meant someone’s dream did not pan out the way they had hoped.

If the restaurant owner is like us, a small family business, they want to recoup as much as possible from the business they gave so much to. So they ask for key money, often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. We saw one family restaurant online that was asking for $500,000 in key money for their space which hadn’t been renovated since the 1990s. Another small family restaurant asked for $275,000 and so on. Not because they were being greedy, but because this is what this restaurant was worth to them. You could feel they had sacrificed so much to building their restaurant, and they of course wanted something to show for it.

The irony is that many small, independent restaurants can’t afford to pay this kind of key money for a space. It seems like only large restaurant groups or corporate tenants can pay these families what they deserve. So these days, those spaces are out of reach for fellow mom-and-pop restaurants.

Despite our tiny budget, we have looked at numerous spaces asking for key money over the years. We had held out some hope that we would find investors to boost our budget (more on that in a future newsletter). Many of baroo’s customers seemed to live in Silver Lake and its surrounds, so in 2019, we looked at a tiny, jewel box of a restaurant space on Sunset Boulevard that we were sad to see closing.

The kitchen was tiny, had no storage space and was even smaller than old baroo’s kitchen. But it had a beer and wine license! They were asking more than $200k in key money, but with a beer and wine license included, we thought about it. We talked about where we would store the beer and wine because it was unclear to us where they would fit. Maybe next to the bathroom. We talked about the dining room and how it would be easy to serve because it was so small. Small spaces only need small teams! We imagined replacing the colored window glass with clear glass so people could see our diners having a delicious, lively time clinking their wine glasses which would be stored who-knows-where when the night was done. We talked so much about the space it was rented to someone else by the time we put in an offer.

That happened to us a lot. Kwang and I would talk about a space a lot. We do a lot of thinking and parsing and projecting. Some of it is over-thinking and us being slow, yes. But some of it is being really careful when your budget is so small.

At a kid’s birthday party not long after, we met the restaurant owner who had taken this space. Their concept was perfect for the area. We were, or at least I was, rueful and a little jealous. We pass by this space all the time, and in the end, they never opened in that space and the door still bears the sign of the former restaurant we toured years ago.

2020 – Pandemic Pause

When the pandemic kicked off in the US, we took a break from looking at spaces for baroo. We had just had a baby (hi, Taehoon!) and we were working on opening Shiku which was supposed to open in April 2020. Restaurants went through so much (along with the entire world) and many, many, many journalists have covered this so I won’t rehash it here. But, you know, these times were dire. For most of 2020, Kwang and I wondered if we should pull the plug on Shiku and move back to Korea immediately.

We didn’t pull the plug on Shiku, which thanks to the pandemic, took up an inordinate amount of time to get sorted. And we are still in LA, as you know! So, since I’ve rambled more than I expected, I’ll pause here until next week when Part II of our location search will hit your inbox, along with more on our new location!

xx mina