So where should we eat?
JONATHAN GOLD RESTAURANT CRITIC >>> If you have been watching the Pyeongchang Olympics hoping to catch a glimpse of the area’s famous buckwheat noodles, or wish that the coverage reached to the local trout farms as well as the biathlon and the luge, you aren’t alone. Korea is one of the most fascinating food countries in the world, with regional dishes that seem to change from block to block, a mind-wrenching array of fermentations, and spicy foods hardwired to jolt the pleasure center of your brain. ¶ Los Angeles, of course, is lucky enough to have the largest Korean community outside the motherland and a concentration of restaurants that pick up trends sometimes just months after they have hit Seoul. Koreatown isn’t just a Korean neighborhood — with its markets, nightclubs, towers, billiard parlors and food-obsessive mini-malls, it sometimes seems as if it is a distant prefecture of Seoul that just happens to be extra-rich in Salvadorans and Oaxacans; a place that honors not just the emigrés who started arriving in California in the late 1970s but also their children — Chloe Kim! — who have invented a brand new way to be American. A-Won
Sometimes I think A-Won should be better-regarded for its seafood tangs — boiling, frothing, chile-smacked soups served in red-hot communal pots. Al tang, thick with mushrooms, herbs and chewy sacs of cod roe, is especially good. But it is hard to get out of there without ordering al bap, a hearty Korean equivalent of Japanese chirashi: a bowl of seasoned rice striped with different kinds of roe, a bit of omelet, and even a bit of barbecued eel. The Korean sashimi isn’t bad, either — it’s bigger than the Japanese kind, and you can dose it with bean paste and raw garlic if you want. But the restaurant’s famous specialty is
hwe dup bap, slivers of raw fish that you toss at the table with greens, vegetables, pickles and hot rice, tinting it as red as you dare with chile paste that you squirt out of a repurposed ketchup bottle.
A-Won: 913½ S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 389-6764
Beverly Soon Tofu
If you asked a CGI guy to reinvent tofu, it would probably look a lot like soondubu, a heaving mass that spits like a lake of volcanic lava and broadcasts a fine, gory mist of chile and broth. The soondubu cult has spread pretty far in the Los Angeles area, and you can probably find it within a few minutes of your home. But the local
soondubu masters have been preparing the dish at Beverly Soon Tofu for something like 32 years, and the barely gelled blocks of pure, subtle tofu, which you can order spicy or nonspicy, are still unsurpassed. I like the version with clams.
Beverly Soon Tofu: 2717 W. Olympic Blvd. Los Angeles, (213) 380-1113
Bon Juk
Koreatown has rarely been noted for its serenity, but on the right afternoon, when you’re slumped into the kind of low padded chairs that resemble artifacts from a bank lobby circa 1983, Bon Juk, the local outlet of a popular Seoul-based porridge specialist, can seem soothingly bland. The walls are dominated by huge photographs of the various kinds of porridge on offer, along with descriptions of their nutritive virtues — the porridge with smoked salmon comes off almost as a Korean version of a Scottish kedgeree, and the deluxe jeonbokjuk is spiked with an impressive quantity of chewy abalone shards. The pumpkin porridge with glutinous rice dumplings is sweet, gentle and utterly calming. Are you going to get the spicy porridge with octopus and kimchi instead? I don’t blame you.
Bon Juk: 3551 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 380-2248
Buil Samgyetang
It is not difficult to find samgyetang in Koreatown restaurants. The brothy, whole game hen, stuffed with sticky rice, jujubes and gnarled fingers of fresh ginseng, is one of the most restorative dishes in a culture dedicated to restorative cuisine — it’s like delicatessen chicken soup times 10. But the best
samgyetang in Koreatown is probably at this cramped mini-mall specialist. When you sprinkle a bit of gray sea salt into the bland soup, the flavors bloom as if by magic: pockets of puréed garlic infusing the rice, plumes of sweetness trickling from the dried fruit, and a lovely chickeny aroma erupting from the bird’s soft flesh. For an extra couple of bucks, you can substitute shaved deer antler for the ginseng, but I’ve never felt the need.
Buil Samgyetang: 4204 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles, (213) 739-0001
Chunju Han-il Kwan
Budae jjigae can seem a bit like an urban legend when you first hear about it, a spicy Korean soup thick with hot dogs, Spam and packaged ramen noodles, ingredients originally cadged from American military bases around Seoul. It is sometimes called military stew, sometimes Johnson tang, in honor of President Johnson. I should probably emphasize that Chunju Han-il Kwan is a nice place, with an elegant array of banchan, small plates, served before the meal, a large repertory of traditional soups and stews, tons of seafood and crisp, lacy potato pancakes. It serves proper Korean food. But what draws the crowds on weekends is undoubtedly the level-10
budae jjigae, kimchi, rice cakes and fresh chrysanthemum leaves crowding the processed meats — and what you eat is both delicious and unmistakably Korean, another example of the culture’s genius at finding the beauty in unpromising ingredients.
Chunju Han-il Kwan: 3450 6th St., Los Angeles, (213) 480-1799
Eighth Street Soondae
Soondae, blood sausage, is one of the most popular Korean dishes in Los Angeles as well as in Seoul — thin casings stuffed with oxblood and transparent threads of rice vermicelli, then boiled in an organrich soup, fried crisp or sautéed with vegetables and heaps of spicy bean paste. It’s oddly genteel stuff,
soondae, neither as funky nor as goopy as you might fear. And at the lovely Eighth Street Soondae, one of the oldest of Koreatown’s many
soondae parlors, it is the stuff of shirtsleeve business lunches. The house combination plate includes crunchy fried soondae, sliced pig’s ear and a heap of boiled pork intestines, evoking the Korean equivalent of a Lyonnaise bouchon.
Eighth Street Soondae: 2703 W. 8th St., Los Angeles, (213) 487-0038
Ham Ji Park
Some people think that Ham Ji Park's spicy gamjatang, brick-red pork neck and potato soup, may be the single-best hangover cure in an area dense in hangover cures. The chowder-thick brew certainly feels soothing. There are a lot of other
gamjatang specialists in Koreatown, but the density, the soft meat and the piney snap of the version at the original Pico Boulevard Ham Ji Park always strikes me as the most pleasant — ranking even a tick or so above the soup at the restaurant's 6th Street branch. The restaurant’s other great dish is pork ribs — beautifully caramelized and not too sweet, a massive pile to be snipped into edible mouthfuls at the table with a pair of scissors. An order of each, supplemented with beer and soju, is more than enough food for four or five.
Ham Ji Park: 4135 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 733-8333
Han Bat
Sullungtang is a peculiar specialty for a restaurant, basically beef bones boiled for days until the liquid turns pearly gray and the aroma is more of minerals than meat. It’s bone broth in its most intense form, yet as soothing as a glass of milk. It may take on presence only after you stir in green onion tops and a smidge more salt than you may think it needs. A lot of places in Los Angeles do sullungtang. At Han Bat, it is the only thing on the menu, ready to be supplemented with flank, brisket or a variety pack of cattle organs. Some people consider it vulgar to flavor the soup with the house chile paste, but we promise not to tell.
Han Bat: 4163 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, (213) 383-9499
Hangari Bajirak Kalgooksoo
The longest lines in the restaurant strip mall on 6th at Alexandria are for Dan Sung Sa — its spicy galbi jjim is a pure adrenaline rush. But the second longest are for the thick, hand-cut noodles at Hangari. At noon and in the early evening, the waits for both places are about the same, which can lead to 45 minutes of pure FOMO, flitting back and forth between the sign-in sheets, unwilling to commit to one pleasure or another. And then your name is called at Hangari, and you settle into an enormous bowl of those noodles in anchovy-scented broth, lavishly paved with tiny manila clams, spiked with well-aged kimchi (if you’ve asked for it), a longsimmered umami bomb. I’m still not sure why a tiny bowl of dressed, cooked barley is brought out before the noodles — an extra dose of starch? — but the chewy grains are nutty and delicious.
Hangari Bajirak Kalgooksoo:
3470 W. 6th St., (213) 388-2326
Jae Bu Do
Dinner at a shellfish grill is one of the most enduring rituals in Koreatown. A waitress scatters clams on a wire grill; you pluck them the moment they pop open. Tiny scallops on the half-shell seethe in butter. Surf clam shells sizzle. Huge oysters steam in their shells. Prawns blacken. Snails simmer in vessels fashioned from aluminum foil. Sweet potatoes roast in the embers. You dip everything in gochujang, melted butter or both. If you pay a little extra, hagfish, an ancient precursor to the eel, will be set to writhing on the grill too. It’s as easy as specifying an A, B or C dinner. Jae Bu Do is open until 2 a.m., which can be handy if you’re looking for somewhere to have supper after a show.
Jae Bu Do: 474 N. Western Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 467-2900
Jeon Ju
When you visit the city of Jeonju, you will probably notice that many of the streets are lined with restaurants serving tossed rice salad, the region’s great gift to cuisine. So it is no surprise that the Koreatown restaurant Jeonju serves practically nothing but
bibimbap — a minimalist concoction of rice, mountain vegetables, an egg and oddly delicious bean sprouts (plus meat if you want it) tossed with a big spoonful of the fermented chile-bean paste gochujang. Jeonju’s bibimbap is as deep and complex as a dram of old Scotch. Try the dolsot version made in a superheated stone vessel. There will be a subtly smoky flavor and a delicious, crunchy crust, like Korean tahdig, to nibble on toward the end of the meal.
Jeon Ju: 2716 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 386-5678
Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong
There are those who might dismiss Baekjeong as a chain restaurant owned by a celebrity. And they are right, at least inasmuch as the place is owned by a Korean wrestler-turned-reality show star, a life-size cutout wobbles outside the front door, and it is hard to avoid the idea that it is expanding too rapidly. (I’m not crazy about the branches in Temple City or Buena Park.) But even
given the two-hour wait for a table on weekends, Baekjeong is still one of the better Korean barbecue places in Koreatown: set menus of short ribs and bulgogi and beef tongue and pork belly are nicely seared off on big tabletop charcoal grills. The grills are surrounded by built-in wells in which scrambled eggs and corn cheese will cook in the course of your meal. And you should also probably get an order of shaken dosirak, a Korean lunchbox that you whang around until the contents rearrange into a crude bibimbap. It may be the only standard restaurant dish anywhere in the world whose origin points to a bored 6-year-old on a playground.
Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong: 3465 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, (213) 384-9678
Kobawoo House
When I first started going to Kobawoo back in the first Bush administration, I assumed that the house specialty was Korean pancakes: seafood pancakes ballasted with scallions, fluffy potato pancakes and lovely, crisp mung bean pancakes, bindaeduk, studded with bright pink bits of pork. Later, I decided it was the place to go for
samgyetang, a whole, ginsengstuffed game hen served in a pot with some of the city’s best chicken soup. It took a while, but I finally figured out what everybody was waiting in line for was the bossam, sliced pork belly that you wrap into cabbage leaf tacos with turnip kimchi, sliced chiles, fermented tiny fish — and cloves of raw garlic, if that’s the way you roll. You are going to want soju with that, a bottle of cold beer, and maybe a nap in the Uber on the way home.
Kobawoo House: 698 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 389-7300
KyoChon
The Korean fried chicken wars have come and gone. The next strip mall opening is much more likely to involve science-y desserts or beef soup than it is yet another alt-KFC. And the brine-steam-fry recipe in David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook turns out to be pretty easy to make. But while the heat may have come down a bit on KyoChon since it was the whitehot center of the fried chicken universe, the shattering, thinskinned snap of its basic, garlicsaturated bird is still worth keeping in mind. And it comes with all
the marinated turnip cubes you can eat.
KyoChon: 3833 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, (213) 739-9292
Ma Dang Gook Soo
Gook soo, the thickish hand-cut tagliatelle at the heart of the Korean noodle kitchen, may be the ultimate Korean comfort food, served in a stock based on dried anchovies, and topped with kimchi, seaweed or meat. Ma Dang Gook Soo is probably the classic Koreatown noodle shop, and it is hard to imagine a summer without its kong gook soo, those same noodles in cold soy milk flavored with a few drops of sesame.
Ma Dang Gook Soo: 869 S. Western Ave., No. 1, Los Angeles, (213) 487-6008
Mapo Dak Galbi
To go out for dak galbi is to submit to its ritual, to spend 90 minutes floating through the cosmos on dak galbi time. You sit around a table with a pit in its center and a ventilation duct humming overhead. You will be asked what to eat, but the question is a formality — you will be eating chicken from a communal iron pan. The waiter dumps a big bowl of marinated chicken onto the iron pan, then rice noodles, then sweet potatoes, then chopped cabbage. Just at the point when you wonder whether it is all going to burn, somebody comes by to stir in what looks like an armload of pungent
ggaenip leaves and you pounce onto the sweet-hot mountain of chicken. When the food is mostly eaten and the chile sauce boils down to a thick, glossy puddle, the remnants are transformed into another mountain of fried rice. The crunchy, half-burnt bits at the bottom are widely considered the best part. And they are.
Mapo Dak Galbi: 1008 S. St. Andrews Place, Los Angeles, (323) 795-0014
Myung In Dumplings
I have never quite gotten over the short life of Chungsil Hongsil, a shop owned by the relatives of a K-pop idol that served what were by far the best Korean dumplings in town. But the dumplings at Myung In, in the requisite cramped mini-mall storefront, are really pretty good, especially the wang
mandoo — snowy-white buns blown up to the size of small grapefruit, stuffed with loosely packed fistfuls of ground meat and aromatics. They’re slightly refined versions of the mandoo you might pick up near a subway station in Seoul, and slightly irresistible in spite of their size.
Myung In Dumplings: 3109 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 381-3568
Park’s BBQ
Park’s may no longer be the only top-end Korean barbecue place in town, but the beyondprime short ribs, beef tongue and rare-breed pork belly at Park’s are of the highest possible standard, the banchan are inventive and fresh, and the cold noodles called
naengmyon, the traditional finish to a barbecue meal, are tart and springy. Even things like stone-pot octopus, braised black cod and a simple kimchi jjigae have depths of flavor you may not expect. It is probably beyond argument that Jenee Kim’s modernist restaurant is still the best place in Koreatown to eat Korean barbecue.
Park’s BBQ: 955 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 380-1717
Soban
When somebody asks me to name the best dish in Koreatown, I invariably tell them to try Soban’s
ganjang gaejang, an ultrafresh raw crab briefly marinated in housemade soy sauce — a glorious, gelatinous, sea-briny mess. The crabs are expensive and never as large as you wish they would be. If Soban weren’t so genteel, you can almost imagine yourself wrestling for the leg, scooping up rogue lumps of roe, or turning the shell over to scrape out whatever fragments of tomalley might have adhered to the inside. Before the crab, there will have been Soban’s famous presentation of 18 or so
banchan, the tiny side dishes that form Act 1 of a Korean meal. The spicy galbi jjim, the ubiquitous braised short-rib preparation, is just stunning here, as weightless and as caramelized as an effort by a Michelin-starred chef. And it would be a mistake to leave without trying the eundaegu jorim ,a gorgeous, spicy casserole starring braised black cod.
Soban: 4001 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 936-9106
Sun Nong Dan
The restaurant is named after an archaic term for sullungtang ,a gentle bone broth famous for its effectiveness as a morning-after tonic. But the swelling crowd outside the tiny Koreatown storefront is there for the short-rib stew, galbi
jjim, which is pretty much everything about Korean cooking cranked up to 10 — a violent red lagoon of meat and broth, hissing and bubbling, enveloped in a small universe of steam. If you have ordered it with cheese — you have to order it with cheese — a waiter scoops a big handful of white stuff over the top and blasts it with a torch until the mass breaks down into oozing, char-flecked rivulets that stretch from your chopsticks like pizza goo.
Sun Nong Dan: 3470 W. 6th St., Suite 7, Los Angeles, (213) 365-0303
jonathan.gold@latimes.com Twitter: @thejgold