The Guests of Baroo
More stories of the people of baroo, this time about those who patron our new restaurant
There’s a moment of marvel every night at baroo where I look across the dining room and survey the faces of our guests. Our dining room is open and cozy, so I can sit at the bar or perch near the front and see every single guest. I try not to look too intensely or for too long in case someone catches me staring and becomes uncomfortable. But I love to gaze around at all of the guests. Part of the reason is to see whether they’re enjoying themselves and the food. When a guest nods and their eyes widen after taking a bite, it makes my night!
I also love to see who has come to dine with us and wonder about their stories. It’s incredible to me how much we can learn about our guests by the time they finish their dinner. First, there’s the information we have before people even walk through our doors. Our reservation platform allows people to create one-line bios for themselves but very few people take the time to create bios on Resy. (This is not at all a nudge to write about yourself on Resy. My view is that it’s better for there to be just essential information on reservation platforms like severe food allergies. I’ll be honest, a few of the bios lean towards the self-aggrandizing, and then many bios are outdated since people do not remember they had created a bio in the first place. If anything, this is a nudge to make sure your allergy information on reservation platforms is up-to-date!)
Anyway, before each night of service, we survey the list of reservations to see if we recognize any of the guests’ names. These are usually the names of our regulars or friends of ours or our team members. And then someone on our team will google every guest in case there’s someone that we should take particular note of. That could mean being a chef from another restaurant or working in the industry in any capacity really, or being a food journalist or celebrity. Googling has very severe limitations especially for our universe of guests, so we don’t spend an inordinate amount of time researching you, please don’t worry.
The first problem is that many of guests have names that are difficult from which to gather useful information. Michelle Lee is coming? David Park? Soo Kim? Mina Park?? We are delighted to have you but we will not be able to pinpoint beforehand which one of you is coming to dine. Once our entire bar was filled with three separate, unrelated parties with the last name, Nguyen, which made me smile! These are the things that happen in LA.
Second, while we are hardly a celebrity hotspot, the famous actors and musicians who have come here have usually just shown up with a friend or book under an intentionally silly pseudonym. One exception was Kristen Stewart who came during our first week and booked under her own name. Please see the paragraph above on challenging names to Google. (She was very lovely and low key as one would expect from a famous actor who books restaurants themselves.)
Most of what we glean about our guests comes while they are at baroo. I try to talk to every guest, or in restaurant jargon, touch every table. I’m trying to work on having the nerve to just casually wander around the tables and ask people how things are going. But if people don’t realize you’re the owner, it seems a little random and I find it breaks the flow of their conversations. And I definitely don’t feel comfortable declaring when I approach a table that I’m the owner. So I’ve been pushing Kwang to do the wandering around (he also does not love randomly approaching tables) or I just find any other excuse to touch the tables. Luckily, there are many opportunities — that might be bringing a dish to your table and along with a description, sharing the dish’s background, or I might offer you something bubbly (champagne, makgeolli, fancy French non-alcoholic sparkling apple cider!) to celebrate your anniversary. Whatever the reason, when I start talking to guests, I start to learn more about them. And what I don’t learn about you directly, I will make assumptions about with Kwang, ha!
Along with the handful of celebrities, here are some of the different kinds of guests that we’ve had come through so far:
Baroo loyalists
I’m still floored by how many people come who share how they were fans of old baroo. Old baroo closed 5 1/2 years ago and the fact that people remember it, feel love for it still, enough so that they would come to the Arts District and try this entirely new experience that we’re offering now, is humbling and to us, unbelievable. A couple of weeks ago, we had one guest who shared how she came by herself to the last night of service at old baroo. She had ordered every single item on the menu one last time, at least what was not sold out by the time she came. She was almost in tears talking abut that night, which of course, almost brought me to tears. Remembering that exceptionally long, emotional last day of old baroo with someone who felt similar emotions as a guest was so special.
There have been so many people we have seen recently at new baroo who have talked about their love of old baroo that we are now planning to open a casual restaurant that is more like old baroo and offers some signature dishes from the old menu as well as new dishes of course. But don’t tell anyone, that’s a secret! :) We of course need to find a new space that we can afford and the cycle of looking for a space and working on an opening begins again, soon.
Industry folk
Almost all of the people we know in LA work in the restaurant industry, and of course, those friends have come to new baroo. While our friends mostly own their restaurants, we have had as many people come who work in the industry and are friends of our team. I always enjoy welcoming people we know into the restaurant and showing them what we’ve created, but it’s even more special to me to see how our team will welcome their friends and share what they’ve been part of. I love seeing their pride in what they’re doing here, and I hope that we can continue to create something that makes them feel proud.
We also have chefs and restaurant owners come through who we don’t know but are now part of our growing community. As someone who feels relatively new to LA, I love meeting people who love food as much as we do, who love restaurants and the people who work in them, and are trying to create something unique for LA or elsewhere. A number of chefs who have come in are working on opening a restaurant, thus having the time to come and dine with us. We share stories about build-outs, costs and delays, and I hope that some of the chefs walk away inspired, if at least thinking, if they can do this, so can I!
If you are a husband and wife team with kids, I especially want you to come through our doors (if you can manage to find the childcare)! I loved talking to John and Katianna Hong of Yangban when they came by. Last week, we closed down the restaurant talking to chef Maynard and his wife, Gigi, from Kuya Lord about having kids while trying to run a restaurant, how they split their restaurant duties between themselves and general restaurant operations chat. There were commiserations and congratulations all around. We wish chef Maynard the best at the James Beard awards ceremonies this June where he’s a finalist for Best Chef, California!
One funny thing I find is that sometimes industry people come in somewhat undercover, presumably to do some benchmarking. We had a string of cooks from one out-of-state upscale restaurant that was expanding to LA who came in one after another. We heard later that the restaurant group had made a list of LA restaurants they wanted their team to visit, and paid for their team to try every restaurant on the list. I’m so curious about what intel they sent back to HQ about baroo!
And then there were the two ladies who Kwang and I guessed work at a Korean conglomerate who only took one bite of each course while taking copious photos and notes and discussing the dishes in detail with each other in Korean, while also being smugly dismissive of our team when we asked if anything was wrong with each and every dish that they barely ate. Kwang said that he had similar experiences at old baroo with guests who worked for this Korean conglomerate. When guests don’t finish a dish, I am on alert — did they not enjoy it, was something wrong with the execution? But there are so many different reasons people go out to restaurants and actually enjoying the food may not be one of them, I now realize.
Foodies, but rarely food influencers
Of course, we have a number of guests who are sincerely passionate about food and whose main hobby seems to be dining out, and some may even share their love of food through social media. I don’t have a better term for “foodies” which most people seem to dislike using these days, so I will just use “foodies” here. Please feel free to suggest alternative terms in the comments below!
The foodies we see are primarily Asian and Asian American, not surprisingly. We certainly hoped that the Korean community would come to baroo, but I did not anticipate the volume of Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese and Filipino (first and second generation) foodies who have been eager to try our restaurant. We hope that as the months and years go by, we can be a place for celebration and connection for the AAPI community here. We also hope that baroo can be a source of inspiration and knowledge about Korean food culture. One food influencer, Rick Lee, described baroo as a research institute while waxing rhapsodically about our book event for chef Mingoo Kang’s cookbook, Jang. That may have been one of my favourite descriptions of baroo since we reopened, and we are working on projects to continue that thread of research and sharing knowledge about Korean food traditions.
A note on influencers since I mention Rick: like many restaurants these days, we get a fair number of DMs and emails from influencers soliciting “collaborations” where they presumably eat for free and then will post about us. I typically do not answer those DMs. Of all the messages I’m struggling to reply to, these are last on my priority list. (To be clear, Rick did not propose a collaboration. He won a seat at the Jang event through a drawing we held.)
We do have some people who certainly could be called food influencers who come to baroo of their own accord and on their own dime. Some have now become regulars and even come bearing delicious gifts for us, so more of these types of influencers please.
The foodies we see are of all ages, from college-age to retirement age. And we have many foodie guests who are not of Asian descent as well. Some have traveled around the world in search of unique culinary experiences, and some are mostly immersed in the local dining scene.
When we first opened, I would get nervous when it became clear that guests were well-seasoned foodies. Sometimes, guests will tell me about their other restaurant adventures; and sometimes, I overhear snippets of conversation where guests at a table are debating the merits of other restaurants. My ears would prick up: Are they talking about us, and if not, will they say something about baroo? Though part of me wants to linger and eavesdrop, I also don’t want to infringe intentionally on our guests’ private conversations. So I move away and there’s always something else for me to attend to anyway.
Whoever our guests are, I do often hear what they think about our restaurant as they’re leaving. We say goodbye to our guests and I try my best to be there at the door for as many guests as possible. People are so kind here, or at the very least, extremely well-mannered. Kwang will say not to take compliments to heart and he has an innate distrust of superlatives. But I admit I love hearing guests share that they had a wonderful time, that the service was fantastic, that the food was incredible, and even the more frequent than expected, this was the best meal I’ve had in a long time (or, sometimes we hear, my life!). Not everyone says any of these things and we know not every guest will feel any of these things, but we will do our very best to make as many people feel this way as we can.
xx Mina