courtesy of Gemma Lee
WHEN HUSBAND-AND-WIFE co-founders Gemma Lee and Luis Kim opened Out of Ordi from their Los Angeles home kitchen in May 2024, Lee wasn’t sure there would be much demand for sogeumbbang, the one item they were selling. Sogeumbbang – or salt bread – had been wildly popular in Korea for a few years, but Lee was uncertain whether people in Los Angeles (other than Koreans) would even be familiar with the bread. She just knew that she wanted to serve something classic, and, as she told me, “Bread is something that you consume day by day, and everyone loves bread.”
She worried for nothing. The bakery grew so popular that it opened a brick-and-mortar location within a year and now gets regular visits from food influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers, like the London-based “@bitetwicefoodreviews,” who posted an Instagram Reel asking: “Is the super viral Korean salt bread in LA worth the sixty-minute queue?” (The answer: “Yeah … An absolute riot. It’s got a beautiful crunch … This is absolutely magnificent.”) The crowd can get so big that the bakery has posted guides explaining how to wait in line respectfully on its Instagram, and enforces a limit on how many pieces each customer can purchase. One foodie posted that he waited more than six hours in line to buy bread.
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