Maum, Palo Alto’s One-of-a-Kind Korean Fine-Dining Restaurant, Is Permanently Closed

The coronavirus crisis has claimed its first Michelin-starred permanent closure in the Bay Area. Even though sit-down dining has resumed in the area, Maum, Palo Alto’s two-year-old modern Korean fine-dining spot, won’t reopen — at least, not as a restaurant that’s open to the public.

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. In the end, the Kims say they felt that the format of the restaurant — a three-hour-long, eight- to 10-course tasting menu, with guests seated at one large communal table — no longer made sense, given the realities of sit-down dining in this time of social distancing.

“Thinking about our dining format and the landscape of fine dining — sitting there for long, extended amounts of time next to strangers — it’s just uncomfortable for people, and they won’t have a good experience,” Meichi Kim tells Eater SF.

Here in the Bay Area, Maum was, by and large, the only restaurant of its kind. It was the region’s only explicitly Korean tasting menu spot, though places like the now-shuttered Mosu and Corey Lee’s Benu have featured some Korean elements. The $195 tasting menu included artful, fine-dining takes on dishes like soondae (blood sausage); the kind of roll cake you might find at any Asian bakery; and ddukgalbi, the traditional Korean short rib patty — made here with ground duck meat that gets shaped around a duck bone before it’s grilled. The restaurant also featured a little bit of a Lazy Bear-style supper club format: Before taking their seats at the restaurant’s long, communal table, diners were encouraged to mingle during the opening round of standing cocktails and hors d’oeuvres that began each meal.

Patricia Chang

The restaurant had been closed for the bulk of the coronavirus shutdown, though Michael Kim notes that it recently “dabbled in takeout for three or four weeks.” Even though those offerings were popular, a takeout-centered model wouldn’t have been sustainable for the restaurant, Kim says. When Maum reboots in early July, the chefs will instead produce Korean kitchen staples out of its kitchen, with an emphasis on seasonal pickles, various housemade kimchis, and other fermented items. They’ll also offer a farm box featuring produce from a small family farm in the Los Altos hills that the restaurant sources from exclusively. Everything will be sold on a pre-order basis, with customers ordering items to pick up via Tock, and no one will be allowed to come inside to shop.

In the future, the Kims say, there’s also the possibility that they’ll offer meal kits and other prepared food items. They’ve also discussed using the kitchen as a kind of incubator to feature the products of up-and-coming pastry chefs, they say.

Maum actually started as a private supper club, and the Kims didn’t rule out the possibility that they might eventually use the dining room for private events — and it’s possible, they say, that the sit-down, tasting menu incarnation of the restaurant might be reborn at some point, maybe a year or two down the road.

“I would hope someday that things would go back to normal and we can have a regular restaurant scene, as we did pre-COVID,” Michael says. “This has all been very emotional and scary, kind of like the rug has been pulled from under us.”