Yeobo, Darling is opening in downtown Menlo Park

Chefs Michael and Meichih Kim, the pair behind Michelin-starred Maum, are opening Yeobo, Darling, an upscale casual restaurant in downtown Menlo Park (827 Santa Cruz Ave.) on Friday, June 13, 2025.

Yeobo, Darling will be an amalgam of the chefs’ backgrounds, highlighting Michael’s Korean and Meichih’s Taiwanese roots. Fitting a restaurant operated by a husband-and-wife team, the Korean word yeobo is a term of endearment generally reserved for spouses, meaning honey or sweetheart.

The menu is structured around the idea of a shared meal with many plates on the table, inspired by the tradition of serving main courses with a wide variety of side dishes, called banchan, in Korea.

Here, the meal will start with individual bites, like beef tartare tartlets with smoked radish and kohlrabi or salt and pepper coonstripe shrimp dressed with black vinegar.

Shareable large dishes will include scallop with black bean and cauliflower and crispy anchovy rice. Some of the mains, specifically the pork collar and kalbi, will be served with banchan, an assortment of seasonal accompaniments that will include housemade white or spicy red kimchi.

For dessert, the chefs will offer a milk soft cream topped with seasonal fruit. They will also serve slices of their signature Karat Cake®, a carrot cake topped with cream cheese mousse and gold flakes.

There will be a non-alcoholic and low-ABV cocktail program, along with wines.

Michael grew up in Koreatown, Los Angeles and spent summers in Korea, where he watched his grandmother make ingredients like gochujang and blood sausage by hand before preparing elaborate family feasts. Back home in LA, early morning visits to the seafood market sparked an interest in both cooking and fishing, a passion that he enjoys to this day.

Meichih was born in Tokyo to Taiwanese parents and raised in Orange County, where her mother’s home cooking, an intuitive blend of Taiwanese and Japanese flavors, formed the backbone of her palate. It wasn’t until college, when she began recreating those childhood dishes out of homesickness, that she discovered her passion for cooking.

Though they came to the kitchen from different paths — Michael from hospitality studies and early work at LA’s Michelin-starred Ortolan, and Meichih from an economics degree at UCLA and a stint in finance — both eventually found their way to culinary school. Michael completed his studies at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, also working at REDD, and Meichih attended Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena, with a coveted externship at Per Se in New York, which turned into working as a commis and chef de partie.

Their paths first crossed in Los Angeles, at Tom Colicchio’s Craft, in 2007. Together, they moved to the Bay Area, where Michael joined the Michelin-starred team at SPQR and Meichih worked as chef tournant at RN74 and later as chef de partie at Benu.

Michael and Meichih met Brian Koo in 2015, and the trio began conceptualizing Maum, which opened in Palo Alto in the summer of 2018. Maum was the Bay Area’s first Korean fine-dining restaurant. It opened to widespread acclaim and received a Michelin star in 2019.

Maum closed during the pandemic, and Michael and Meichih opened Bǎo Bèi, a fast-casual concept at State Street Market in downtown Los Altos, in 2021. Much like their previous restaurant, Bǎo Bèi highlighted the couple’s heritage and aimed to introduce the rich flavors of Taiwan and Korea — in this case, their night markets — to diners on the Peninsula.

With the opening of Yeobo, Darling, the chefs are excited to create an experience that is at once refined and approachable, offering guests a new perspective on the flavors and dishes of their childhoods.

Photo of the chefs courtesy of Yeobo, Darling; photo of food by Chad Santo Tomas (c) 2025