About Borit Gogae

Borit Gogae is a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles that specializes in traditional Korean dishes with an emphasis on using healthy and fresh ingredients. The restaurant is widely recognized for its unique menu items and for delivering food that evokes nostalgia and memories of home. It initially opened as a local eatery but has since expanded, serving a greater number of customers from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Whether a customer has ties to South Korea or not, Borit Gogae provides all with a taste of Korean cuisine. Borit Gogae also consistently offers cultural events and cooking classes.

Takeaways + Connection to Project

If I were to put forth one restaurant as the exemplar of my project, it would be Borit Gogae. Not only is its name rooted in Korean history, as it describes a period of food scarcity in the 1950s and 60s when families dealt with starvation and resorted to barley rice and wild vegetables when rice ran out in their homes, but its interior and exterior design and its foods were so richly authentic. It was even more special to have gone to this restaurant with my parents, whose parents (my grandparents) lived through these difficult times and told them stories about their survival and how food became a means of bonding, immense gratitude, and resilience as a nation, which they shared with me over the meal. Every time a new dish came out, my mom told me stories about what they meant to Koreans in the 1950s and 60s (as demonstrated in the photograph descriptions). Corroborating my impression of Borit Gogae were several newspapers and awards that described how this restaurant was the place to feel at home and be reunited with family, especially with one's mother – as one newspaper right beside me discussed. Borit Gogae took my family through a true dining experience, starting with appetizers, bibimbap, the meat, and then traditional dessert.

In addition, I had the opportunity to talk to one of the employees, and they shared that the paintings featured on the walls were those of the owner, who takes art classes and brings back her paintings to display at this location (she has several restaurants). The paintings already took me aback but after hearing that the owner had painted them all herself, I felt inspired and absorbed into Korean history because these paintings depict such particular moments of the 1950s, including women carrying baskets of food and resources on their head as they watched their children and walked miles back hom to make the most out of what they had to support their families. Borit Gogae not only preserved Korean authenticity, but is also a role model of it.