Welcome to those of you have joined the Sook party in the past couple of days thanks to
’s post on the future of food media! I loved hearing how other “non-writers”like me found their way to Substack, so thank you, Emily, for including me and my tiny newsletter! I may write a post later introducing myself a bit more, but for now, I’d rather talk about more important people in my life, our team at our restaurant, baroo.Creating and managing a restaurant team for baroo is a pretty new thing for us. Old baroo was staffed by Kwang, his former business partner, Matthew Kim, and for most of the first iteration’s life, a dishwasher named Tomasa or Tommy for short. People who wrote about old baroo almost always mentioned the fact that baroo was operated by only two people. Being a two-man operation was part of baroo’s lore. But there was Tommy in the back washing the dishes and later helping with prep.
When I joined baroo in 2018, Tommy wasn’t managed. She didn’t need to be managed. She showed up, worked hard, cared about baroo and we tried to take care of her in return. The day after old baroo closed in October 2018, Tommy and her relative, Ruth (who helped us in the final hectic weeks of old baroo) showed up with all the fixings for homemade pupusas. What might have been a mournful day was joyful and celebratory, with the sound of laughter as masa balls were formed, stuffed and pounded in their expert hands. Tommy and Ruth prepared a mountain of pupusas, with fluffy piles of refreshingly acidic curtido and silky-smooth tomato salsa. I’ve never had more delicious pupusas ever and since.
When we opened our 2019 pop-up, Baroo Canteen, Tommy was there. When we opened Shiku in Grand Central Market in 2021, Tommy was there and she still is. (Ruth is now part of our team at baroo.) We would not have survived those baroo years and the years to come without Tommy.
But it was with Shiku where we had our first real foray into building and managing a full team, with a team of cooks, dishwashers and cashiers. At Shiku, we were lucky to have as the core part of our team, Tommy and two young Korean American cooks straight out of culinary school, Gene and Sean. These two ambitious young men wanted to work with Kwang because of baroo and, frankly, they wanted to work at baroo not Shiku.
While Gene and Sean dreamt of modern Korean fine dining, they patiently spent their days frying chicken and grilling galbi, hauling goods from our walk-in in the depths of the Market basement, and plating takeaway doshirak with intention and all seriousness. There were times when pandemic fears started to wane and restaurants were desperately rehiring, when places like Majordomo were throwing around signing bonuses and new modern Korean places like Yangban Society (as it was called when it opened) were popping up. Kwang and I were resigned to the fact that Gene and Sean would likely leave for a bigger and undeniably better opportunity. Kwang even talked to them about it and said we would understand if they wanted to move on. Instead, Gene and Sean stayed with us (for two and a half years!) until we finally reopened baroo, which still astonishes me. We wouldn’t have survived those Shiku years without Gene and Sean (and Tommy!).
You may be sensing a theme here. When Kwang and I started hiring for new baroo, the new restaurant was going to be more formal than anything we had ever operated before. Instead of handing people a number when they ordered food at a counter, we would be doing a coursed tasting menu. Shiku gave us practice with creating more systems for operations than we had ever had before. (Those who have worked at Shiku and baroo and also worked elsewhere may laugh a good laugh at this, but truly, we have never been this organized, promise!) I had had practice managing payroll with our Shiku team. We were pretty practiced at running a skeleton crew for minimal table service at old baroo which consisted of dropping plates on tables and picking up the stands with order numbers when orders were complete, or yelling out numbers from behind a counter at Baroo Canteen or Shiku when orders were ready.
I had several moments in the wee hours of the morning last year where I questioned our decision to jump into (our version of) fine dining rather than warming up with more casual but proper sit-down restaurant. How arrogant were we?! I found the idea of a reservation system and table arrangements especially intimidating. Let’s just say that I did not sleep well from the end of February 2023 to about December 2023.
Then we started gathering our baroo team. We had Gene and Sean, thank goodness for them. And then we had Jason, who was a cocktail guy who had emailed us several times over the years expressing his admiration for baroo and his hope to work with us. We never had a beverage program or a liquor license before so never had a proper place for Jason. We hadn’t intended on hiring a beverage-focused person for new baroo actually. But Jason reached out and said he had been a beverage director but also wanted to explore being a front of house manager and then said he had informal experience managing front of house. Well, that was more experience than either Kwang nor I had in the front of house. So, we met Jason in person finally after years of emails over coffee and we liked him immediately. Soft-spoken but with strong convictions, thoughtful and progressive-minded. He was our first new hire for baroo.
Next came Matt. Hiring a sous chef to be the right hand person for Kwang was our main focus when we started hiring. Kwang has very high standards, ingrained in him by nature and also years of working in European two to three-star Michelin-starred restaurants and also enduring two years of Korean military training as a chef for the generals of the Korean CIA. Matt has an excellent pedigree, extremely well-spoken and intelligent and a very talented and passionate chef who is also plugged in to the LA restaurant industry and fellow chefs in a way that Kwang and I were/are not. We asked him to join our team and he quickly gained the trust of Gene and Sean and has since become a mentor to the younger members of the baroo team.
So during our pre-opening weeks which turned into months, we were six people. Kwang, Matt, Gene and Sean worked on R&D in the kitchen. Jason worked on cocktails and non-alcoholic drinks. Jason and Matt had relationships with seafood, wine, vegetable purveyors. Jason knew his way around Toast POS, spreadsheets calculating tip distributions and training guides. There were so many aspects of operating a restaurant that were new to us and Matt and Jason’s experience helped ease the craziness of opening.
When we started hiring for the full team, Kwang and I were focused on experience and mostly on attitude. I’ll mention a few things that we liked to see in a candidate: Before the interview, aside from the obvious need for experience, we like to see at least one sting of more than a year at the same place. It’s probably more rare these days to see someone stay for several years at a restaurant. We are more often sent resumes where people work for just a few months at places and jump around which makes us wonder, whether it’s completely fair or not, if they know what they’re looking for in a job or if they have trouble fitting in places for some reason. We asked everyone we hired for baroo to stay for one year because we need continuity and commitment ideally.
Also, I personally like to see thoughtful and respectful responses to our messages. The people on our team who have worked out on our team wrote quite proper emails to us when they communicated with us during hiring. The issue for me is not respect but about being able to communicate well and appropriately with people. As has been highlighted to us several times the last six months, communication is paramount (from all parts of the team but more on that in another post).
More important than anything else, when we meet people for interviews, we look for kindness and openness. Kwang describes it as being pure-hearted. In life, we shy away from people who thrive on playing games and being overly strategic, those who need to prop up their egos with bravado or being overly competitive. Kwang is not a macho chef who runs a macho kitchen. Those types of kitchen still do exist though they’re hopefully on the wane! I spent years working in corporate law and am now highly allergic to insincerity and arrogance. We believe that you can adhere to high standards without being pretentious or arrogant. I think that when you look around our team, you will find talented professionals who are truly good people focused on being good people. Earnest is a long-dismissed adjective but I would say that earnestness is our hallmark. Not that every single person could be characterized as earnest because everyone on our team is different.
We opened new baroo with fifteen people — servers, a server assistant, two dishwashers, chefs de partie, a beverage director who also managed front of house, a sous chef and the two of us. We did a week of training for our opening team before we launched our friends and family soft opening. On the first day of training, we handed out Hello, My Name Is name tags for everyone and were all seated around six tables that had been pushed together. I teared up (as I do) looking out our team. After almost five years of waiting, we finally had our baroo team. There was excitement and a sense of collaboration in this new project called baroo, and I was, true to form, verklempt. I had a strong feeling of hope and confidence that with this team we would be able to create the baroo that had been living in our heads for so many years. I was proven right from the very first day.
I remember we started one session asking everyone to share the first restaurant they worked at and their job there. Everyone had been working in restaurants for years and some even worked in restaurants since high school. My answer to the question seemed to surprise the others. Baroo was the first restaurant I ever worked in. That tells you all you need know about how much I know about restaurants! I ran my own culinary pop-up called Sook in Hong Kong but that was worlds apart from working in and definitely running a restaurant.
Everyone around the table had something useful to contribute to our pre-opening. Jason taught me what steps of service actually meant. We tweaked so many of our systems before we opened whether it was our reservation system to ingredient ordering based on what our team shared with us. Every time someone asked a question, I discovered a new issue I had to learn about and we needed to make a decision on. I learned so much from our team in that week and honestly have never stopped learning from them.
When people asked me how our opening was going, it was shockingly smooth. And that is almost entirely thanks to our team’s professionalism and experience (with some credit to our preparation too). I was expecting meltdowns in operations during our opening days and weeks. And yes, the internet went down in our neighborhood on our first day of soft opening. But our team handled every issue with aplomb and quiet confidence. And that’s all I will remember from our re-opening. That it was smoother than expected. Far from perfect of course, but it was not a mess and for that I will always remain grateful to our team.
It is amazing to me still that since the beginning of new baroo we actually have so many experienced professionals around us to bounce ideas off of, who are willing to share their thoughts on what we are trying to do here collectively. We would not have survived our reopening with our team.
So it was only fitting to us to credit them on our menu like you would have credits for a film. Your meal at baroo wouldn’t be possible without the collective effort of our entire team. It’s not just a two-man operation anymore and now you know, it mostly never was.
xx mina
This is better than anything I learned in my MBA program. Much love to the whole fam. I’m constantly in awe! Can’t wait to be back.
I love the credits on the menu. Bravo.