There are an estimated 4,000 restaurants in San Francisco collectively serving up tens of thousands of dishes. For Gazetteer SF, food enthusiast and man-about-town Omar Mamoon is recommending the best ones. This is Order Up.
Sweetheart. Baby. Babycakes. These are terms of endearment we commonly use with our loved ones to show affection. My parents speak Urdu, so the one I heard often was jaanu, which means “my love.” And although I grew up in Fullerton, which is home to one of the largest Korean communities in America, the term yeobo is new to me; it translates to “honey” in Korean, which I learned after dining at the newly opened Asian restaurant Yeobo, Darling in Menlo Park from husband-and-wife chefs and co-owners Meichih and Michael Kim.
“We were inspired by it mainly because I heard Michael’s parents say it to each other a lot,” Meichih explained. “It just really stuck with me.”
The Kims first met in 2007 while cooking together as part of the opening team of Tom Colicchio’s Craft location in Los Angeles. Michael moved to San Francisco to work at the Italian fine dining restaurant SPQR as sous chef, and Meichih followed, spending time in kitchens like RN74 and Benu. They eventually married, had a kid, and opened the Korean fine dining restaurant Maum in Palo Alto (the equivalent of having another child, basically), which was awarded a Michelin star before becoming a casualty of the pandemic in 2020.
Having eaten at Maum back in the day, I can legitimately confirm the duo is better than ever and that Yeabo, Darling is one of the best new restaurants to open in NorCal this year.
Unlike their previous concept which offered a tasting menu served at a long communal table, Yeobo is a la carte and patrons get their own tables (with cool custom cutlery compartments built in to boot).
Also unlike the previous restaurant, the food celebrates both partners’ backgrounds.
“The restaurant combines our heritages and our cuisine layered in with our identity being Asian American and our experiences growing up in America,” says Meichih, who was born in Tokyo to Taiwanese parents.
There’s no better dish on the menu that encapsulates this cultural blending than the hearty lu rou lasagna, which combines the comforting classic Taiwanese dish of braised pork belly lu rou fan with the Italian American classic — specifically, the easy grocery store variety many of us enjoyed as kids. “For me it was growing up and eating frozen lasagnas during college,” says Meichih.
The base of the lasagna is the ragu. The Kims use pork shoulder which they grind in-house in lieu of the belly to add a bit more texture. They cook the meat down with a mixture of garlic, ginger, alliums, as well as a bit of dark sweet soy sauce, oyster sauce, and black vinegar with the goal of achieving the lu rou fan flavor profile. They also add a house dashi to the mix that’s made by steeping together kombu and bonito flakes.
“If you look at the history of Taiwan, there’s a lot of Japanese influence during colonization,” says Michael, who also adds Korean anchovies to his version.
The pasta is made out of spinach and chrysanthemum leaves, which is common in Korean cuisine and brings a pop of beautiful green. They roll out the dough, cut into neat squares, then layer the dish in the following order: pasta, ragu, basic béchamel, and a sprinkling of parmesan.
The five layers of pasta are cleverly stacked off center (instead of neatly on each other) so that when the dish bakes, there are multiple crunchy corners — the best bites of any lasagna, really. It’s brilliant.
“It also incorporates our path throughout the industry,” says Michael. “We’ve worked in western restaurants, French restaurants, American restaurants, Asian restaurants. It shows our experience throughout the last 20 years in the culinary field and brings that full circle to our experiences growing up.”
But the lu rou lasagna is just one of the many delicious dishes on the menu at Yeobo, Darling. Come with your sweetheart or babycakes and order all the things.
