Plugs — Baroo

L.A. food, drink, and leisure recs from restaurateurs Mina Park and Kwang Uh + LINKS

Plugs is The Angel’s recs column. Every week, you’ll get six picks—a restaurant, a bar, a shop, an ingredient, a person, and a treat—from someone in Los Angeles who knows what they’re talking about, plus a selection of Angel-curated links. (Plugs are for paid subscribers of The Angel only. However, if you’re in the restaurant industry and want a free subscription, hit me up. :))

#45 is Mina Park and Kwang Uh, the couple behind the dynamite Arts District Korean restaurant Baroo and Shiku in the Grand Central Market. Since its 2015 start as a scrappy, hyper-creative, fermentation-driven strip mall joint hailed by the late great Jonathan Gold as “a taste of the future,” Baroo has closed, evolved, closed again, and then reopened. In its current iteration, Baroo is a casual-leaning tasting menu destination recently named The Times’ 2024 Restaurant of the Year by critic Bill Addison. There’s more to say, but for now, I’ll just say this: Baroo is a truly special, uniquely Los Angeles restaurant, and if you haven’t been yet, what are you waiting for? Meanwhile, Shiku is where Mina and Kwang serve homestyle Korean food like chopped bibimbap and kimchi-braised pork belly. Also worth noting: Mina writes an excellent Substack,

Sook by Mina Park

, full of musings on hospitality, family stories, Korean recipes, and more. Here are their L.A. Plugs!

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Restaurant — Borit Gogae

As people who deeply love restaurants, from the inside and from the outside, it's so hard to pick one. Today, we'll pick Borit Gogae in Koreatown. Their specialty is a barley bibimbap (boribap) with an entire table filled with different veggies and sauces to mix into the barley, as well as an array of banchan, soups, and pancakes that you can't find elsewhere in L.A. They serve truly nourishing and nutritious, fresh Korean food. It's the one place in the entire city of L.A. where our child will eat a variety of vegetables and other tables will exclaim to us, "Your child eats so well!" Meanwhile, he spent the rest of the week pining for French fries and ice cream. Their perilla seed and chicken stew is a family favorite.

Photo by Mina Park.