Rebirth of a Restaurant: In Search of Our Second Home, Part II
The reveal (not by me!) of our location and our plans for new baroo
Welcome to all you kind souls who are following the baroo journey after this week’s Eater article announcing details of new baroo. I think I unintentionally created a cliffhanger in my last newsletter regarding our new location, and I thank and apologize to those of you who were willing to play along and wait until my next dispatch. I don’t want to play games with you all! It was really that I thought I had rambled on way too long last week and I forget that people don’t know what I know sometimes!
So for those of you who have just joined, this newsletter is sometimes about baroo and Kwang and I opening and running restaurants as small-time, independent operators in these difficult times. And sometimes, this newsletter is about Korean food traditions and recipes and delving into aspects of Korean cuisine that inform our work, like temple cuisine, the five elements, Korean traditional medicine and of course, fermentation. Mostly, in the end, this newsletter is my way of ensuring I have a regular writing practice and now that you are all here, I cannot make excuses, thank you! Eventually, some posts will be reserved for paid subscribers, I’m thinking the restaurant-related ones so I have more freedom to write freely with a smaller audience. Right now, I’m just surprised honestly that you’re all following along and very grateful!
Picking Up Where We Left Off
Last week, my story paused when we got to the pandemic. Kwang and I were swept up in new parenthood and trying to open what was supposed to be a side project at Grand Central Market. Prior to March 2020, we were impatient that we hadn’t found a site for new baroo yet. But many, many, many times during that first, anxiety-filled year of the pandemic, we looked at each other and thanked the universe that we were not in the middle of a giant build-out or struggling to get a new sit-down restaurant off the ground in any of the spaces we looked at. Opening a takeout food stall was more than enough for us.
Shiku is a seven day a week, all-day operation in an iconic, bustling market. It is intense. And thanks to the various challenges that all restaurants are facing like hiring difficulties and exponentially rising food costs, it took some time for us to get Shiku to a point where we could even consider looking again for baroo. So it took until a year after Shiku opened for Kwang and I to feel antsy and want to cook in the baroo vein again.
We do feel like we’re working backwards a little. We had always talked about this progression we imagined for our restaurants. First, we would reopen baroo in a similar fast casual format as old baroo, very low key but in a nicer space with beer & wine. As an old baroo supporter told us once, “give the people what they want.” Then we would do a Korean fine dining concept that could truly express Kwang’s culinary voice. We could use the ingredients we wanted to use and be more free to experiment fully. And then would come our fast food concept that would make Korean food more accessible. This is the tried-and-true progression that notable chefs follow around the world (for whatever cuisine they champion). And we believed very strongly that this was the only logical way to grow our business.
But the pandemic threw logic and well-thought out plans out the window. After running Shiku for a year, Kwang and I concluded that it didn’t make sense to open a casual version of baroo in these times. We were very wary of falling into a similar cycle of running, running, running to make a fast casual business work that we found ourselves in with Shiku and old baroo. With inflation and rising costs, ceilings to what you could/should charge, the prioritization of volume over experimentation, we didn’t have it in us to re-create old baroo in this moment. That will need to wait until later. As independent operators, it is exhausting. So it seems we are following the reverse logic of what all those chefs (who are smarter and wildly more successful) have done. We opened Shiku first and now we are doing our version of a fine dining restaurant next. Not that running a restaurant with a tasting menu isn’t exhausting, we know.
Baroo Yeon, or Destiny’s Child
Years have passed since Kwang first opened baroo. We are both older now. If it’s not now, it’s never is how we kind of feel. And if the economy is going to be as messy as it has been, we might as well cook the food at the level we want to cook and find joy in being creative again. It feels like the right time to share what we believe is the pure essence of baroo.
I was honestly surprised when Kwang started talking about doing a fine dining concept again. When he was younger, that had been his aspiration like so many young chefs straight out of culinary school. But in reality, he eschews luxury and has no interest in cooking for a single audience. Plus we don’t have the means to do a traditional, fine dining restaurant with polished interiors, expansive teams and book-length wine lists. So this will be done as baroo has always been done, bootstrapped in a seemingly haphazard fashion that we hope turns out okay anyway. We want to keep the price point lower than the typical fine dining and offer the highest quality, thoughtful dishes that we can within our budget.
After we realized that our concept had shifted, we found ourselves uncomfortable in certain spaces in certain neighborhoods. We both really loved a friend’s space in Lincoln Heights but it felt inappropriate for us to open a tasting menu restaurant there. Even if we wanted to offer a tasting menu that was affordable relative to other fine dining restaurants it would certainly not be affordable relative to the neighborhood. There were a few places we ruled out for that reason. So, the Arts District seems like a good home for what we want to do.
We first saw this space at the end of July last year. Then it took almost seven months to sign the lease. We encountered what we often ran into - the landlord liked our concept but wanted a well-funded, more established, bigger operator. What one real estate broker once described to us as blue chip, implying that we were definitely not that. Business is business, so that’s fair enough.
We may not have secured this space at all if our future landlord had not asked their family friends in the final hour who they should pick as tenants. These family friends are in the restaurant business and have a small, beloved restaurant that happens to be Needle. The Needle folks, Ryan and Karen, said, ‘definitely baroo.’ Cue my tears (which are free-flowing these days. Motherhood has made me a mushy, tear-stained mess.)
We will be eternally grateful to Karen and Ryan for vouching for us. We did not know each other well personally. We had supported each other’s restaurants, followed each other’s journeys on social media and felt part of this community of independent, husband-and-wife, AAPI restaurant owners who are balancing new parenthood in LA! Who else is part of this special, very specific community? Let’s meet up whenever we have time, which is never, but let’s support each other at every opportunity like the Needle family did for us!
Our landlord shared this background with us when we met him for the first time. He came to Shiku, ordered lunch anonymously and sat at a table observing our operations for an hour before our meeting. He was impressed by our team and our hands-on operations. So we are also thankful to our Shiku shiku always. In the end, though we are doing things backwards, Shiku helped pave the way for this new baroo.
Kwang and I call new baroo, baroo yeon. Yeon means ‘destiny.’ It’s just a nickname. The new restaurant will be called baroo. But what we are working on feels like what baroo was meant to be and what we were both meant to do.
And we can’t help feel like destiny indeed played a hand for this decidedly not blue chip business to find our second home. Destiny plus, more significantly, community. And we can’t imagine a better way to kick off this reincarnation of baroo.
xx mina
wow...shoutout to Needle for that incredible endorsement! It's so crazy that landlords are so conservative with the tenants they choose. In my mind, Baroo is very much a blue chip operator! thanks for sharing this incredible intel.
looking forward to the opening. thank you for sharing your journey