Kwang Uh is deconstructing Korean cuisine at Baroo

On entering Baroo, a restaurant re-opened in 2022 in the post-industrial district of Downtown Los Angeles, I didn’t immediately feel the energy of a bold concept. The cement frame is softened by a minimal, hygge aesthetic in gentle lighting, Arley chairs, and vases filled with pastel-shaded flowers. Strong, but more subtle in spirit, you have to glance around the room to spot the thoughtful, rich details that give Baroo its identity.

“After first seeing the site, we needed to offset the industrial space,” says Executive Chef Kwang Uh, “to make people feel more warmth and comfort, which is our mission at the restaurant.”

Mina Park is Uh’s partner in life and business, and she told me that the space also incorporates elements of a hanoak (Korean traditional house) and that the restaurant was redesigned by OWIU Design, whose directors were regulars of the first iteration of Baroo. As I sat at the counter, I first noticed a small whiteboard with a Buddhist-aphorism reflecting on the value of food as physical and spiritual sustenance. Throughout the evening, I noticed paintings of monks, apothecary cabinets, branches and fuchsia-hued lotus flowers placed like sculptures and lit up above the fridge, curved Korean text intertwined with naturalistic symbols.

Named Restaurant of the Year by LA Times food critic Bill Addison, Baroo is a Korean fine-dining restaurant marked by intention. Uh draws inspiration from chef René Redzepi of Noma and Seoul-based chefs Hee-Sook Cho and Mingoo Kang, but the most salient influence on this unique restaurant is Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan. Uh spent six months in Kwan’s hermitage, where he became familiar with ancient fermentation techniques, and the philosophy of temple cuisine. The tasting menu reflects this and is organized around the Buddhist life cycle, with each course representing a phase of life.

Uh developed an interest in cooking from a young age, majoring in food service management and working in prestigious kitchens like Picholine, Daniel, and Nobu before pursuing a master's in food anthropology, where he did his dissertation on Korean fermentation. After staging at Quique Dacosta and Noma, he worked on research and development with Mingoo Kang at Mingles Seoul, before opening the original Baroo in 2015 with Park, who transitioned into the restaurant industry after a successful career as a corporate lawyer. After the 2018 closure of the original Baroo, which was a small operation located in a Hollywood stripmall, they started looking for a site that met their ambitions to open a much larger space with a proper team.

“At first, we were planning on opening a casual version of Baroo, similar to the original space,” says Uh, “But as time passed, we both felt it was the right time to offer a more fine-dining modern Korean experience in LA.”

Baroo 2.0 represents a significant upgrade from the original space and operates with a much bigger kitchen and front-of-house team. “There are too many differences between old and new Baroo to list,” says Uh, adding, “we do work to ensure that the Baroo culinary voice and philosophy are still clear despite all the changes.”

Given the strong ethos guiding the menu at Baroo, I was keen to understand how Uh develops dishes. He told me his thought process begins with researching traditional Korean cuisine and then deconstructing dishes from the corpus. This is done by applying the principles of yin and yang and the five elements, focusing on balance, life cycles, and understanding nature's path. One example he offers is Baroo's kimchi fried rice, which “reflects the five elements represented by an ingredient or element,” he says. “Metal is represented by spiciness. Wood is represented by sourness. Fire is represented by fire itself or smokiness, and so on,” adding, “I try to create a dish that I haven’t seen or hasn’t been tasted before.”

The result is a spectacularly refined journey of poetic, tender, and uplifting moments. A serenely sweet, melt-in-your-mouth Hokkaido scallop is perched on a calming, emerald bath composed of gim (seaweed) and minari (water celery), bedecked with wild puffed rice, that adds a satisfying crackle to the mouthfeel. A black cod dish combines a wild fillet of the fish, the color of caramel from a soy-braising, with the perky flavors of lemongrass, buttermilk, and green papaya. Pork collar sourced from regenerative farm Peads & Barnett is served juicy and flamingo-pink, blanketed in a glossy, sumptuous goulash jiggae sauce, and delicate baek (white) kimchi. The final stage is so meditative it transports me to an imaginary hill in Busan—just me and the ethereal play on bingsoo, traditionally a shaved milk-based ice, here featuring snow ice and sorbet made with peaches from Andy's Orchard—an award-winning California farm, renowned for its heirloom stone fruits. The dish is finished with a black sesame crumble, adding a salty edge that completes the immaculately composed dessert.

“I look for each course to be connected to the course that came before and the course that comes after,” Uh tells me. “Ideally, the flavors should crescendo with each course. But no course should be out of balance in the progression.” Naturally, this philosophy lends purchase to a certain dynamism, and new dishes emerge to represent this process and seasonality. “Right now, my favorite dish is the lobster dish,” Uh tells me, some months after I ate there, “which is composed of a deep-fried lobster served with a bowl of a doenjang risotto made of Job’s tears, Korean beans, corn, a lobster bisque, and lovage oil. It tastes Korean but it also tastes like something new and different from traditional Korean food.” The dish started with his mother’s doenjang jjigae and crab doenjang jjigae. “And through the ingredients,” he explains, “it becomes something new. Mina says this dish tastes most like pure Baroo among our current menu.”

Alongside the excellent food there’s the option to go for either a wine pairing, which focuses on low-intervention wines from California and Europe, or a more interesting option. “In Korea, the artisanal sool movement has been strong and we've been so impressed by the sool pairings we've had in restaurants like Mingles,” Uh explains. This led them to introduce a Korean sool (alcohol) pairing, which features makgeolli (rice wine), soju, and other drinks made from fermented rice or distilled corn and sweet potato. “Last month, we sold twice as much sool as wine,” says Uh. In taking on the mantle of pushing Korean alcoholic beverages, they represent drinks from Korea, and a few from the burgeoning US industry. “It seems people are eager to learn about sool,” Uh adds. “And we're on the cusp of sool becoming a household name like sake.” 

When it comes to their vision for Baroo’s future, their goals are multifold. “Our plan is to have Baroo be a restaurant that contributes positively and meaningfully to our community and to causes that matter to us such as climate change and food insecurity.” With Baroo 2.0’s success, Uh and Park have begun travelling much more for collaborations, with exciting ones to come in the year ahead, starting with a James Beard Foundation Greens dinner in February. As Uh explains, “We hope that we can grow into a restaurant that is a vital part of the fine-dining world globally and demonstrate, in our voice, the beauty of Korean culinary culture.”