We are back from our trip to Korea (more on the trip to come!), and the single most important thing we need to finalize now is nailing down our opening, which means finalizing our financing. How does one finance a restaurant? If you read last week’s newsletter, you know that Kwang and I have not spent very much on past restaurants/pop-ups; so, this is our first project where we had to think seriously about funding. Baroo has never had investors. Baroo has never had a bank loan. In the past 4 ½ years since we have been working on bringing back baroo, we have gone down various rabbit holes thinking about how to finance our restaurant. In case this is useful or interesting to some of you, this week I’m going to touch on what we have done and are still doing to get our restaurant off the ground.
And because we are starting to get into more into the weeds of running a restaurant, this week is when I’m beginning to reserve the restaurant-related newsletters for paid subscribers. While I want this newsletter to grow organically into what it’s meant to be for me and for all of you, my plan from the beginning was to save restaurant stories for paid subscribers, mostly so I can feel freer to share details with a smaller audience. Now that we are getting into the somewhat awkward details of our financing, this seems like a good time to start. As I’ve mentioned before, all subscribers will have access to stories of Korean foodways and recipes, which is the heart of Sook.
It's taken some time to write this dispatch. It feels oddly vulnerable to talk about the financing of baroo. There’s nothing particularly unusual about how we are approaching it, but people don’t really talk about it publicly. I wish people talked about it more. There seems to be a hush of secrecy around restaurant financing. I wonder if for some, there is a scarcity mindset and they are hesitant to share their resources. (I have a little story on this later.) And I’m sure there are some restaurants who have investors or backers who want to remain private. But to the extent possible, I believe it would help everyone enormously if we could be transparent about what it takes to open a restaurant. So here’s our story…
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