I mean destination for people who don’t care too much about food. I should have rephrased that, and I think @ShadrackToussaint says it better than I did. You weren’t gonna meet up with your pals at Needle if you didn’t care a ton about food. There’s so many other places to do that for cheaper and with much more booze. But yes that does seem to be a good place for an ambitious restaurant to die! Black Cat on the other hand…
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Ironically, Needle was in a shopping center that had a decent sized lot. I always found parking there. I just think with their limited space and menu, the numbers were not working anymore. It’s such a shame….
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Also, maybe the landlord raised the rent? It sucks that so many things are working against small businesses in L.A. right now.
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At least reading the eater article it sounded more like an exhaustion/scaling issue vs a revenue issue. Seems like they were working crazy long hours and had trouble hiring and retaining talent.
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a little eerie the similarities to baroo1.0’s closing - one man/couple show burning out and then matt kim takes over the space for rice bowls…
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Restaurant people, esp know and value each other in the Mom & Pop run businesses. Mina Park thanked Team Needle on her substack on HOW they acquired the new Arts District location despite bids from other more "corporate " type of restaurant groups eyeing the same space. How is it not full circle, that another local restaurant with a Baroo connection takes the Needle space that benefitted both parties?
Local restaurants with any measure of success work long hard hours. Instead of nefarious implied stuff based on nothing, go open your wallets and support the independent restaurants.
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i certainly didnt mean to imply at all that anything nefarious was going on - the eerieness is with respect to the signifcant parallels between their trajectories and the business prospects of restaurants aiming for a certain type of quality that is well-appreciated by ftcers but not so much the general public
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What I appreciated about Needle vs so-called similar places is their sourcing. They cared as much about the ingredients as the deliciousness. I didn’t get to try some of the new menu items but will so miss the char siu and soft scrambled eggs & shrimp. 
I agree this might’ve been a problem when it comes to that particular area.
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Good job, Inspector @PorkyBelly.
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I wonder why they’d open another BBQ + Rice at that location when there’s another one that is not very good close by on Virgil and Santa Monica.
I think this is a little misleading about what happened with Baroo 1.0 and Matt Kim. Matt Kim was one half of the two-man show for Baroo 1.0 – it was Kwang Uh and Matt Kim. Mina Park was not in the picture as far as I know. And Matt was not a silent partner, either, he was there in the restaurant running things alongside Kwang every day. It was only after Kwang Uh decided to go a different direction that Matt decided to hang onto the space and pivot to BBQ + Rice.
Not saying it was your intention to imply anything nefarious or untoward about Matt, and I don’t think it was your intention. I’m just adding the above so that readers have more context in case they had taken away the wrong impression.
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Beside the egg York French toast, I could find their other dishes in other areas and from other restaurants. I could find their char sui too elsewhere. Would it taste the same as needle? No, but the fact that I could find something similar elsewhere is a fact. I thought Needle’s food was great, but their location was weird. It was on sunset where historically it’s been a dominant where whites and Hispanics/latins etc have lived. I lived in silver lake and echo park for most of my life from the 90s to 2018. Sunset has had Asian food before but historically it doesn’t do well. If a place does well, it normally close to Alvarado street or in echo park. The fact that restaurants are Asian based (using Asian to generally all types of Asian food), outside of Chinatown was interesting to me because my first thought was that Chinatown and Little Tokyo were too expensive or there was no room in these two locations. I was happy to see places like Konbi and Needle on sunset, and I hoped they survived in the long run. That fact that these places didn’t does not surprise me. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons and even old places that my family used to work in on sunset are now gone. The landscape of the demographics of LA is/has been changing and this what I meant by: Needle was great, but if you can’t tell me who your audience is (brunch, lunch, dinner, casual/take out or restaurant) then your target is everyone and that’s a terrible target. It spreads you thin. Needle regrouped and changed their hours, but after the pandemic I think they tried, but couldn’t turn things around. Their food was never the problem, but their business plan(s) probably were. Also when you look at historic filipino town since that’s on the other side of the hills that touches sunset, it parallels sunset since only a few old businesses there have managed to survive there as well. There’s a clear divide that you see of where old and new businesses have formed between sunset and the 101 and Temple.
I want these restaurants like Needle to survive in LA, but there’s years of historic divide that influences who lives where, where to eat, and where to buy certain items at X location.
As I’ve said before, I’ve never been to Needle, but something about your post comes off as unfairly blaming of the owners, and some of it honestly strikes me as being overly simplistic and possibly uninformed.
As someone who frequently went w/ his parents to Chinatown and Little Tokyo in the 80s and 90s, your interpretation is… interesting.
As far as I remember, Little Tokyo was totally moribund by the early 1990s. It wasn’t a place that a thriving business wanted to be.
I’m not sure if you meant to imply otherwise, but the “historic divide” is one that clearly has roots in macro factors (I have only skimmed the article in some of the links below):
Respectfully, that’s simply your opinion.
I personally an audience that’s inclusive is absolutely wonderful.
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Pine & Crane does great two blocks away, which I think undercuts your geographical theory.
I think one of Needle’s big problems was the relatively tiny dining area.
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Did they serve alcohol?
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Needle: it was difficult to retain staff, we had a kid, and I couldn’t work until 3-4am everyday
FTC: It was the location, it was the rent, it was the parking lot, it was the local clientele, it was the consumer, it was gas prices, it was too expensive…
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Seems like if he was having to work until 3-4am, the problem was not a lack of sales / customers.
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I’m truly sad to hear that and I’m sad this location wasn’t the place you needed to flourish. I really hope that Needle comes back someday in a way that meets the goals that Needle wants to reach.
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