Baroo, innovator of Korean dining, is The Times’ 2024 Restaurant of the Year
The third of six courses at Baroo — the dish where the momentum behind Kwang Uh’s modern Korean cooking, light and assured, becomes fully realized — is a ssam of fried sole, built on a leaf of butter lettuce that lives up to its name.
Its soft pleats cradle the fish, sheathed in a batter made from three flours and vodka for maximum crunch, and latticed with powdered seaweed to give the appearance of tiny green veins. Red shiso and perilla bring their distinct, mint-adjacent sharpness. Sauces of gooseberry emulsion and seaweed remoulade go in separate directions, astringent and rich, creating tightly pulled contrasts.
Each element adds to an organic beauty that calls out to be clutched. Which is exactly the intention. In hand, the wrap disappears in four or five bites. In memory, the layered intrigues will keep hanging around.
The whole experience of dining in Baroo’s comfortably elegant Arts District dining room can be like this.
At face value, it’s a beautiful tasting menu, priced at $110 per person and paced at a pleasing clip to reassure Angelenos otherwise impatient with prix fixe dinners. The emphasis is on vegetables and herbs and seafood; one course comprises densely delicious short rib or pork collar meat alongside a singular bowl of rice seasoned with things like dried shepherd’s purse (a plant in the mustard family) and XO sauce fashioned from chorizo. Uh is a master with fermentation. Kimchi, pickles, the Korean building blocks of soybean-based jangs and even buttermilk, paired in one sauce with lemongrass, open doors to unseen worlds of flavor. In Los Angeles, where traditional expressions of the cuisine define the Korean restaurant ethos, Baroo stands apart as the city’s most persuasive foray into innovation.
There’s also plenty more powerful context if you go looking for it.
Baroo, with its many longtime fans (I’m among them), began as a project nearly a decade ago in an unassuming Hollywood strip mall. Uh, partnering initially with his childhood friend Matthew Kim, poured years of culinary education and kitchen gigs around the globe into intricate, wildly satisfying grain bowls and pastas they sold for $9 to $15 each.
Having just the pair run the place was taxing to the point of unsustainability. In 2017, after the restaurant had received waves of local and national acclaim, Uh left the restaurant for more than six months to live at the Baekyangsa temple in South Korea. He was there to apprentice with Jeong Kwan, the Zen Buddhist nun and chef who received worldwide attention the same year for appearing in an episode of “Chef’s Table” on Netflix. While there, Uh also met chef and writer Mina Park. They eventually married and became business partners, charting the future for Baroo after its first iteration closed for good in the fall of 2018.
Read full article at https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2024-07-09/baroo-los-angeles-times-2024-restaurant-of-the-year-kwang-uh-mina-park