“Come for a cheesesteak, stay for the game.”
Andrew Ahn was born in New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia from the age of five. His parents had come from Seoul a few years earlier, in 1979. He moved around the city as a kid, which is how somebody ends up with real opinions about a cheesesteak rather than a tourist’s.
He came to Los Angeles in 2002. The shop began with a question from his father: where do you get a decent cheesesteak around here? Andrew could not name one. They opened the first Boo’s together in East Hollywood, and the Koreatown shop followed on Wilshire.
The name is his grandmother’s. Lee Boo Soon raised him more than anyone else did, and the sign carries her name.
The Philadelphia part is not decorative. The rolls are Amoroso, shipped from Philadelphia, because a cheesesteak falls apart in anything else. The deli meat is Dietz & Watson. In 2016 the Asian Business League of Southern California named him its Entrepreneur of the Year.
On game days the patio on Wilshire fills up early. Plenty of people come for a cheesesteak, $4 Modelos and $4 wine, and stay through the afternoon. It is the reason Boo’s is the standing early stop on our crawl. The place to be before the night starts, a few doors down from the Bounty.
Sources: interviews and profiles published by K-Town Is OK, USC Annenberg Media and Secret Los Angeles, plus the Asian Business League of Southern California.
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