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 an.