Given the difficulty of being a seasonal Korean restaurant, the menu also highlights California produce, such as summer tomatoes served with perilla and a vinegar-seaweed sauce. When diners arrive, they’ll stand for a 30-minute reception, during which the kitchen will serve canapés such as a corn tartlet — a riff on a low-brow Korean dish of corn and melted cheese — and “soondae,” Korean street-food blood sausage. The Maum kitchen is fueled by a small, private farm in Los Altos Hills that exclusively supplies the restaurant. Kim wanted to have a farm to ensure access to quality Korean produce, which is difficult to come by, even in the Bay Area. Probably just another kimchi & korean short rib joint with a star to enable higher prices.
Staff also bond through various sports activities such as soccer, ping pong, Pilates and HIIT. The Amsterdam office is located in a vibrant part of the city, right next to the Ziggo Dome, which hosts concerts and other cultural events. It is also close to the Amsterdam Arena soccer and sports stadium, gyms, bars, restaurants and other fun and festive venues. In Korea, restaurants are owned by a group of people called the “Kim Jong-il Family.” They own and run businesses all over the country including hotels, bars, restaurants, and even the G-d of Korea itself. The owner of the restaurant, Park Hae-jin, was born and raised in Seoul. Hae-jin was a student in a local high school when the Korean War broke out during the early 1990s.
So Gong Dong Tofu House is the highest-rated Korean restaurant that serves breakfast in Palo Alto.
The kitchen is fueled by a private farm in Los Altos Hills where the chefs work with a farmer to grow hard-to-find Korean produce for dishes such as kkakdugi brisket rice and abalone porridge. At Maum, which is open just for dinner four nights a week, diners eat at a long, wooden communal table that accommodates 16 people. Scene in the Bay Area is small but mighty, and its loyalists treasure the cozy mom-and-pop shops in San Francisco and Oakland, grocery delis all along the Peninsula and hyper-specific cowboss silversmith specialists in Santa Clara’s bustling Koreatown. Instead, starting sometime in early July, Meichih and Michael Kim, the restaurant’s husband-and wife chef team, will reopen Maum as a retail operation, selling pantry staples and prepared foods out of its downtown Palo Alto space. Korean-Chinese to the core, Oakland’s Yu Yu Za Zang focuses on Shandong-style dishes customized to Korean tastes. Among the most famous is jajangmyeon, made with hand-pulled noodles and a starchy black bean sauce.
All that is served alongside Dennis Lee’s splendid pizza project, Sunset Squares, and Filipino dishes by pop-up Uncle Tito. Chungdam is an outright gorgeous restaurant, full of artistic touches like geometric, cloud-like light fixtures and subtly designed decorative ceramics. Even the outdoor seating area, an enclosed section of the parking lot, is decked out with potted plants and billowing sunshades.
“Almost nationwide you either grow it yourself or know people that grow it. Most of the base Korean ingredients are commodity-farmed.” Kim said they decided to make Maum more publicly accessible in response to requests from Koo’s friends. The kitchen team is currently adding to and tweaking the summer menu in anticipation of a July 12 opening. After graduating from The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena in 2007, he cooked at Craft in Los Angeles, then SPQR and was the opening chef for Namu Gaji, a Korean restaurant in San Francisco.