Kwang Uh and Mina Park's Baroo is the Times' Restaurant of the Year 2024

The third of six courses at Baroo – the dish that fully showcases the dynamism of Kwang Uh's modern Korean cuisine, light and confident – ​​is a piece of seared sole, prepared on a leaf of butter lettuce that lives up to its name.

Its soft folds cradle the fish, coated in a batter made from three flours and vodka for maximum crispness and laced with powdered seaweed to give the impression of tiny green veins. Red shiso and perilla bring their distinct, minty-adjacent spiciness. Sauces of gooseberry emulsion and seaweed remoulade go in different directions, astringent and rich, creating tense contrasts.

Each element contributes to an organic beauty that invites you to touch it. That is exactly the intention. In your hand, the wrap disappears after four or five bites. The complex intrigues will remain in your memory.

The entire experience of dining in Baroo's cozy yet elegant Arts District dining room can be like this.

At first glance, it's a beautiful tasting menu, priced at $110 per person, and paced at a comfortable enough to appease Angelenos otherwise impatient with prix fixe dinners. The emphasis is on vegetables and herbs, as well as seafood; one course consists of delicious rib or pork neck meat, plus a unique bowl of rice, seasoned with things like dried shepherd's purse (a plant in the mustard family) and XO sauce made with chorizo. Er, is a master of fermentation. Kimchi, pickles, the Korean building blocks for soybean-based jangs, and even buttermilk paired in a lemongrass-infused sauce open doors to unimagined worlds of flavor. In Los Angeles, where traditional expressions of cuisine shape the Korean restaurant ethos, Baroo stands out as the city's most compelling push toward innovation.

There's also plenty of more meaningful context if you look for it.

Baroo, with its many longtime fans (I'm among them), started as a project in a modest Hollywood strip mall nearly a decade ago. Uh, initially working with childhood friend Matthew Kim, invested years of culinary training and kitchen gigs around the globe into intricate, highly satisfying grain bowls and pastas that they sold for $9 to $15 a pop.

Running the place as a couple was so exhausting that it was no longer sustainable. In 2017, after the restaurant received waves of local and national acclaim, Uh left the restaurant for more than six months to live at Baekyangsa Temple in South Korea. There he apprenticed under Jeong Kwan, the Zen Buddhist nun and chef who gained global attention that same year for appearing in an episode of Netflix's Chef's Table. It was also there that Uh met chef and author Mina Park. They eventually married, became business partners and began planning for Baroo's future after the first iteration closed for good in fall 2018.

Even before his Arts District reincarnation finally came to light last September, Baroo remained in LA's restaurant consciousness. Yes, the model was unsustainable, but the insanely detailed grain bowls and noodles with gochujang-twisted oxtail ragù were like nothing before or since: stunning, comforting, and stubbornly affordable. Most of all, the cooking was personal and full of grace. Uh arrived at something fresh in these dishes by connecting to his identity—to everything, his heritage, his travels, his curiosity, his intellect, his imagination.

Creating menus that reflect a chef's narrative is typical in LA, from street taco stands to omakase counters. But the synthesis of ideas in Baroo's kitchen was empowering in a new way. Even though none of our up-and-comers ate at Uh's original restaurant, I see a through line of self-determination among recent achievers that began as pandemic-era pop-ups. Upstarts like Kuya Lord, Quarter Sheets, Villa's Tacos, Poltergeist, and Azizam. Sample the cuisine at any of these places and you'll learn about the people who invented the dishes. Their successes remind us: No life is linear.

At the old Baroo, I would sneak glances at Uh, standing alone at the stove in the small, secluded room. I could never tell if he looked meditative or about to collapse. Probably both? Now I see him in his open kitchen, surrounded by staff. He looks determined but fundamentally happier. No naivety: running a restaurant is hard work. But Uh and Park have turned a fleeting legend into a working reality. That in itself is inspiring, and Uh is evolving in his craft.

With 24 hours’ notice, for example, you can order a vegetarian version of the tasting menu, instantly one of LA’s most brilliant plant-based feasts. The main act is bansang, a tray of bowls of wonderfully seasoned rice (sans chorizo) and banchan with seasonal vegetables, as well as evergreen treasures like dried acorn jelly with the thick chewy cavatelli. There’s a soup so profound and mineralic, so unfathomable in its distillation of seaweed, mushrooms and other flora, that a spoonful of it transports me back to the wildness of Uh’s revelations of the past decade. The meal began with “Pine Kombucha Cappuccino,” a variation on Korean jatjuk that transforms the essence of pine nuts into a milky liquor. It was a comforting beginning, and also a little mysterious in its depths. After all these years, one of our greatest culinary minds can still puzzle us after his triumphant return. As he should.

Baroo is the LA Times' 2024 Restaurant of the Year.

The Restaurant of the Year award will be given to Baroo's Kwang Uh and Mina Park at this year's Food Bowl festival at Paramount Studios in September. 20. Early bird tickets go on sale this week at lafoodbowl.com.

Previous winners of Restaurant of the Year