I’ve been waiting a long time to review Baroo. When head chef Kwang Uh, along with then-business partner Matthew Kim, opened the original fast-casual version of Baroo in the summer of 2015, I was a rising college junior at UCLA with a fervent but yet-unmonetized interest in food, indifferent towards chasing down food trucks on Twitter and the kind of Lucky Peach-approved L.A. restaurants recommended by toxic chef and editor bros. Across the city, I observed the initial social media-driven hype cycle over Baroo’s first iteration with a leery eye; while the sub-$20 grain bowls were well within the average college student’s leisure dining budget, I was, then as now, allergic to waiting in lines and hype culture writ large.
Though I always meant to go, I never made the trek out to East Hollywood before the OG closed for good in 2018. And that seemed to be that until 2021, when Uh and his wife and current business partner, Mina Park, opened Shiku, a fast-casual Korean lunchbox joint in Grand Central Market. As a brand-new editor at Time Out, I immediately loved the kimchi corn and other thoughtfully constructed banchan sides and dosirak combos. “You would have loved Baroo,” other media folks told me. For a while, I even included the pair’s scrappy food stall on our guide to the city’s best restaurants.
But Shiku is not Baroo, and Baroo is not Shiku. My initial experience with Uh’s original concept dates back to this past September, when the pair finally reopened Baroo as a polished tasting menu eatery in the Arts District. While intrigued by the meal, I left the restaurant peckish enough to demolish an entire banana split at Fluffy’s in Echo Park afterwards. (In the last nine months, Uh and Park have also improved portion sizes across the board with the help of a delightful bowl of noodles topped with crispy seaweed.) For $110 plus tax and tip, there were, and still are, plenty of other ways in L.A. to dine well and leave full—at least for omnivores.
For those on fully plant-based diets, however, Baroo now offers one of the best vegan fine dining experiences in all of Los Angeles. Though I enjoyed the regular menu both times I visited the restaurant (once in the fall and another in the spring), it’s the newer plant-based option that left a lasting impact on me—and, as someone who eats everything, I’d be happy to go back and order it the next time I’m looking for a truly special meal.
Since its original iteration, Baroo has taken inspiration from Korean Buddhist temple cuisine, which in its strictest form eschews all animal products and alliums while placing a heavy emphasis on fermented foods. Though Baroo has always served meat, a small but loyal fanbase of vegan and vegetarian customers have also gravitated towards the restaurant for its fermented dishes and drinks, including experimental styles of kimchi and seasonal kombucha flavors.
“Sharing an interpretation of [Korean] Buddhist temple food was something that we thought would be really fun,” said Park, when I recently spoke to her and Uh over Google Hangouts. “There’s such a huge Korean community, there’s a lot of vegans here, so we thought it would be fun.”
In late 2021, I happened to see a joint exhibit by Uh and Park at a site-specific installation at the Neutra VDL House in Silver Lake. It was only then I began to understand why so many bicoastal food writers had gone cuckoo for Baroo. From a purely narrative standpoint, Uh’s deeply personal mission with the restaurant is fascinating, especially for those who prefer to take a heady approach to dining out. A practicing Buddhist who considered becoming a monk, Uh has always taken a spiritual approach to his cooking, most evident at the current version of Baroo in the form of courses named after different stages of the Buddhist view of the human life cycle, from “tae” (a period before birth) to “jeol,” or rebirth.
His meet-cute and eventual marriage to Park has only added to Baroo’s charming backstory; the pair met at a Buddhist temple in South Korea one summer while both were on sabbatical from their regular jobs. Now, in addition to running a business, Uh and Park also have a young child together. As part of the 2021 group exhibition, Built In, they contributed a pineapple-fermented kimchi recipe, a series of “failed” fermentation experiments and a ceremonial salt offering alongside a Buddhist prayer handwritten by Park:
Where has this food come from?
I reflect on my virtue and am I worthy to receive this,
Ridding my mind of all desire, greed,
regarding this offering as medicine
to sustain our physical being,
for the sake of enlightenment,
we now receive this food.
You can now see this handwritten prayer in the corner of the dining room. Whether you jive with Buddhist philosophy or not, this sense of purpose translates into a quietly excellent meal at the new Baroo, regardless of dietary restrictions. Before opening in the Arts District, Uh and Kwang always planned to offer plant-based menu options, but developing and actually rolling out both menus took a little longer than expected. (The only difference between the vegetarian and vegan menus is the use of dairy in a few sauces.)
On the plant-based menu, the star of the show is the bansang, a collection of different types of pickled and fermented vegetables served alongside a bowl of rice. It’s a direct import from Korean Buddhist temple cuisine, adds Uh, who also cites Zen Buddhist nun and chef Jeong Kwan as one of his many inspirations. Kwan’s vegan temple cooking was featured on Chef’s Table in 2017, and she continues to serve as an inspiration for high-profile chefs from around the world.
Hearty and full of pleasurable textures and flavors, the colorful bansang was easily the highlight of my shared meal—even after a server dropped a complimentary rib eye supplement on the table. “The bansang is Kwang’s modern interpretation of things that he learned at temple,” Park told me during our interview. We also addressed a peculiar coincidence that had sprung up: The vegan tasting menu looks quite similar to the namesake offering at Borit Gogae, a relatively new, fairly casual restaurant in Koreatown serving homey, vegetable-forward Korean cooking. The borit gogae—listed as “set menu with barley rice” on the menu, currently costs $29 per person, a much lower price tag than Baroo.
Having been to both restaurants, I can tell you that while you can indeed go to Borit Gogae for a cozy, mostly plant-based meal, the bansang there lacks the attention to detail and complex flavors that make the vegan menu at Baroo feel worthy of a special occasion or date night dinner. In the preceding courses where Uh swaps meat and seafood out for vegetables, the end result is as thoughtful and considered as the original tasting menu. (I brought two friends, one omnivore and one vegan, and split my vegan tasting menu with the other omnivore.)
Instead of ’nduja spread, Gouda cheese and pichu berry on top of sool bang (bread made with makgeolli), Uh uses fermented moo (radish) and a gooseberry half in the first course. Smoked hearts of palm in a curry ssamjang—a mix of soybean paste and gochujang—and seasonal vegetables delicately fried, pajeon-style, take the place of Hokkaido scallop in a glossy minari and seaweed sauce and an identically fried sole, respectively, in the second and third courses. The only course that falters might be dessert, when Uh removes the goguma doenjang ice cream from the icy bingsoo with guava panna cotta underneath and doesn’t add anything else more interesting to compensate.
The exact components of the bansang and the sauces are likely to change on a seasonal basis, but the overall effect is still just as compelling as the regular tasting menu, if not more so. Despite that, Baroo’s vegan and vegetarian options have yet to attract much citywide fanfare. I’m not exactly sure why. If you’re even remotely interested in exploring the possibilities of plant-based haute cuisine, as I am, the restaurant is more than worth a visit.
Baroo earned four stars from us. For more details on the regular menu and what else to expect from dining here, read our full review.