Body and Seoul
L.A.’s Koreatown spas offer guests a total escape from city
LOS ANGELES — The landscape of the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, a concrete universe of slightly less than 3 square miles in MidCity, is a bilingualsigned jigsaw of strip malls and squat highrises, barbecue restaurants and porridge joints. Koreatown is an oddly soothing quadrant of the city if you open the right doors — a neighborhood filled not with angst but with a network of spas that cater to locals in need of a soak and a scrub, maybe a nap on a heated floor.
Koreatown’s bathhouses are mostly workmanlike in appearance, insulated boxes stacked along the main thoroughfares of the city, many strung along Olympic and Wilshire boulevards like a series of hidden hot tubs. If you start in the east, you’ll find yourself at Wi Spa, a massive complex on Wilshire Boulevard near MacArthur Park and downtown L.A. that from the outside looks disconcertingly like a DMV office. Go through the doors and begin the ritual: You’ll pay a small entrance fee, add on whatever services you want (scrub, acupressure, maybe a foot massage), get a wristband with a number on it and exchange your clothes for a towel in a room that will likely remind you of a high school gym locker.
From this point, it’s a process that can take a few hours or a whole day — many spas are open 24 hours, and there’s no time limit on how long you stay. Inside is a small, selfcontained world: one floor for women, another for men, each filled with hot and cold baths and saunas; another coed floor, called a jimjilbang (rough translation: heated room), with a restaurant and various rooms lined with clay or salt, their heated floors covered with a hopscotch of mats and pillows; there are sleeping rooms, even a library. In the clay room there’s a flatscreen television on the wall, and you watch a cooking show where a woman makes rice noodles with a broth made from chicken feet.
A few blocks northeast from Wi, Grand Spa is another 24hour spot, a giant yellow building that rises out of a nondescript parking lot. Go past some small shops, up the elevator to the third floor (second for men) and there’s another network of baths and steam rooms, a dining room like a smallscale cafeteria, another room filled with lounge chairs like an airport waiting room.
To get to Natura Spa, you take an elevator to the basement of what was once the I. Magnin department store, a stately if somewhat defunct Art Deco building on Wilshire Boulevard. Go past the desk and the locker rooms, the little nail salon and tiny restaurant — serviceable bibimbap, grilled mackerel — and get into the hot tub in the center of the collection of rooms. There’s a steam room, a dry sauna with a television showing a Korean soap op
era and a system of tables where women dressed in black bras and underwear will scrub the layers of the world from your skin.
Hours later, come back up to the city, walk around the block and into a strip mall where you’ll find Kobawoo House, a restaurant that’s been serving plates of bossam and bubbling cauldrons of soybean paste stew since the 1980s. Although most of Koreatown’s bathhouses have little restaurants, this neighborhood has long owned some of the best food in the city: homey soon tofu houses, smoky halls devoted to table-top barbecue, a few nationally lauded restaurants where chefs experiment with blending timeworn and modern techniques.
Detour a few blocks south to Hugh Spa, on the second floor of another worn strip mall. Hugh is women-only, a compact collection of rooms including one equipped with therapeutic infrared light boxes and magnets inside the walls. There’s a little room built from Himalayan salt and another where you can lie in shallow wooden boxes filled with clay balls — lying there, you’re reminded of a graveyard or maybe a raised garden bed, the heat coming from below, the balls moving like marbles under your spine. A tiny kitchen makes dumplings, tofu stew and ramyeon (the Korean version of ramen).
Head diagonally northwest into the heart of Koreatown and you’ll find the newish Crystal Spa, on the third floor of a modern shopping center. Here you can park for free in the lower realms of the massive building, then head up, past a big, bustling grocery store, to the Aveda shop that functions as the gateway into the spa, like a holistic portal. Upstairs, pad around men and women resting on mats in the common room, the flat-screen TV again showing a cooking show. Later, a woman walks across your back, digging her palms and then her heels into the landscape of your body.
After one restoration, another: a bowl of abalone juk at Mountain Cafe, a checkerboard of banchan stretching across the table. You could eat meal after glorious meal and never have to move your car, still parked in the subterranean lot beneath the shopping center.
From Crystal, head northwest a few blocks, where you’ll find, behind a battered door, what looks like a convenience store counter. This is Daengki Spa, one of Koreatown’s oldest spas, women-only, named for a cloth hair ribbon. The baths are smaller and hotter — the steep and cure here more intense — the changing room a wall of lockers near a group of silent women resting on mats, watching a news show. In the corner: a vat of hot barley tea. In the dry sauna, a blue cardboard carton of eggs cooked on the heated rocks; you can buy them on your way out, still warm, knotted up in plastic take-away bags.