Players change at the table in Columbia restaurant biz

It was midnight when Jina Yoo stepped off a plane from Las Vegas, where she had just eaten a tuna tataki entrée that was out of this world. Ignoring her travel fatigue, she picked up some ahi tuna on the way home from the airport so she could try to re-create the dish at home.

“I started cooking right away, before I forgot how the sauce tasted,” Yoo said. “I got it right—maybe even a little better.”

Now, the tuna tataki inspired by a dish at a Las Vegas hotel restaurant is on the menu at her namesake restaurant on Forum Boulevard. The effort exemplifies her determination to beat the odds and succeed in a dicey business.

“It’s a gamble to get into,” said Johnny Lane, owner of Johnny’s Beanery on Green Meadows and president of the local branch of the Missouri Restaurant Association. “The success rate isn’t good.”

Cases in point: Trattoria Strada Nova and Classy’s downtown as well as the franchises Old Chicago on I-70 Drive SW and Garfield’s at the mall. All have closed in recent months.

While there’s always high turnover in the restaurant business, particularly in a growing college town, experts say there appears to be an oversupply in Columbia.

In the last two years, and particularly in the past few months, an unusually high number of restaurants have opened. Another four are opening soon downtown: Bleu at 8th and Cherry streets, The Rome at the former location of Columbia Billiards on 9th Street, Kaldi’s Coffee at 9th and Cherry streets and Pickleman’s on East Broadway.

As the city’s population approaches 100,000, the number of restaurants has passed 650, said Jerry Worley, a restaurant inspector who’s worked for the city for 31 years. “We’ve felt the strain from all the new restaurants coming into the community.”

Lane and James Groves, chairman of the University of Missouri’s Hotel and Restaurant Management program, agree that Columbia’s supply of restaurants appears to exceed demand.

“We’re overbuilt,” Groves said. “I don’t think the customer base is there. We’re splitting the market more and more.”

Lane said the capacity “parallels a little bit” the overbuilt housing market in Columbia.

“There was a time when the population growth exceeded the supply of restaurants,” Lane said. “In the last two or three years, that has flip-flopped, and the market has kind of saturated.”

Groves said locally owned restaurants will have an even harder time than franchise restaurants already equipped with a proven formula and corporate resources.

But Travis Tucker, who is developing the Bleu restaurant and wine bar next to The Tiger, said the downtown area needs more high-quality restaurants.

“The more places to eat downtown, the more it will make downtown a general destination,” Tucker said. “We want to be part of this downtown movement and growth.”

Cory Hodapp and Dan Colace said they believe their family-style Italian restaurant called The Rome will fill a gap in the local market. It is modeled after the Colace family’s Italian restaurant of the same name near Boston, which has been in business since 1965.

“It was always our dream to eventually end up here and do a project like this,” said Hodapp, who befriended Colace when they were on MU’s wrestling team in the late 1990s.

Yoo said she also fills a niche in the market and that the eight-week-old restaurant is getting consistently busier, an indication that her meticulous preparation is paying off.

Yoo had been seriously interested in cooking since she’d won a cooking contest in middle school in Korea. But she was also a talented pianist and followed her family’s wish that she train to be a professional musician.

She came to Columbia 12 years ago with her husband, Sang Kim, the director of the MU Asian Affairs Center. She spent many afternoons in Barnes & Noble, flipping through cookbooks and then trying dishes out on guests who frequently came to their home; her husband’s position entailed a lot of socializing. After teaching cooking classes for three years, she began to get a large number of catering requests and soon was spending more time at the kitchen cutting board than at the piano keyboard.

“I found myself happier in the kitchen than in the practice room,” she said.

Last November, Yoo worked with Virginia Wilson at the University Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to develop a business plan, and she got financing from Boone County National Bank to open an upscale restaurant.

She decided to target the family crowd, so she looked for a space in south Columbia where the average income is highest.

“Location was very important to me,” she said. The Colonial Shoppes were built on a small hill, and her corner building is easily visible from the street below, enticing diners to come up and try the kimchi, gimbap, bulgogi, seasoned tofu or Sin City-inspired tuna tataki—the dish that proves that, as long as local restaurateurs are willing to take chances, what happens in Vegas doesn’t have to stay in Vegas.