Sweet Willie

Still, there is something about sitting outside by the roaring fire pit at Zip, which is one of the grander examples of the breed, admiring the parade of tight dresses, glancing at the film clips that flash across a sort of architectural fin above the roofline, and nibbling on perfect fried calamari, giant slabs of grilled freshwater eel and California rolls that are only slightly less formidable than softball bats. The real surprise was the ghastly sounding kimchi pancake with cheese — a crisp, tangy, mozzarella-glazed Korean simulacrum of pizza that was in no way inferior to a decent pizza itself. 3855 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 365-6677.

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR THIGHS

A waitress scatters a trowelful of glowing hardwood coals into a pit set in the middle of your table. Above the charcoal goes a greased wire screen; around the pit go a dozen or so dishes of pickled cabbage, candied fish, and the rest of the little appetizers and condiments that come with a Korean barbecue meal.

If you are new to this sort of thing, a waitress will unceremoniously dump raw, marinated short ribs, pork loin, baby octopus onto the grill in front of you, returning periodically to turn the meat when it is sizzled crisp, scissoring it into bite-size chunks, maneuvering it so that your ignorance of cooking times injures the meat no more than absolutely necessary. When a bit of meat is cooked to your liking, wrap it in a scrap of lettuce leaf with perhaps a few shreds of marinated scallion and a schmear of pungent fermented-bean paste. Then repeat.

Soot Bull Jeep is the first Koreatown barbecue restaurant that locals will tell you about, and probably the first they’ll warn you against too. Because while it is noisy and smoky, afloat on the vodka-like Korean rice wine soju, with all the bustle you’d expect in the heart of a great city, the same fragrant fumes that give so much flavor to the meat will have done the same to your pants. Dress accordingly. 3136 W. Eighth St., (213) 387-3865.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH DDUK

The current fad in Korean barbecue restaurants is the style of service called dduk bo sam, which means that along with your heaps of raw short ribs and piles of foliage, you are issued stacks of oiled rice noodles, about the size and shape of beer coasters, with which you can wrap grilled meat into plump little tacos with slivered scallions, raw garlic, chile paste, or a bit of the leftover kimchi from the next table. Shik Do Rak pioneered dduk bo rak in Koreatown, and at dinnertime its tables are filled with diners industriously constructing fancy noodle wraps that would probably be a big hit on Chinese dim sum carts. The main dining room is decorated, incongruously enough, with gnomes, faux trellises and vast photomurals of what look like the flower gardens outside West Virginia’s patrician Greenbrier Hotel. Because after all, nothing stimulates the appetite like grainy pictures of rhododendrons. 2501 W. Olympic Blvd., (213) 384-4148.

THE NECK BONE’S CONNECTED TO THE ...

It’s amazing, it really is, the sheer number of Koreatown restaurants devoted to one hangover remedy or another, until you consider the torrents of makkoli and Crown Royal that course through the streets every night. Also, Korean hangover remedies happen to taste really good. Among the best and most restorative of these, as unfortunately we have reason to know, is gamjatang, a sort of thick soup made with potatoes, chile and meaty pork neck bones. Hamjipark, a sticky-table dive down on Pico, does a rather spectacular version of this soup, simmered until the meat has turned almost to jelly and thickened with a brick-red purée of chiles — if you weren’t nursing a hair-of-the-dog shot of soju, you might almost mistake it for a Oaxacan mole colorado. The barbecued pork ribs are not sad to eat either. Hamjipark has a gentrified branch up near the Chapman Market, with the ambiance of an outer-arrondissement sidewalk café, but on Sunday morning, when the roof of your mouth is a killing floor, the grungier Pico restaurant is where you want to be. 4135 W. Pico Blvd., (323) 733-3635; also 3407 W. Sixth St., (213) 365-8773.

FILM AT ELEVEN

Dansungsa is one of those glitches in the time-space continuum that makes us glad to live in Los Angeles, a keyhole to an alternate universe that is almost certainly better, richer than the one we happen to inhabit at the moment. To those of us who cannot read Hangul, the bar is recognizable mostly by the blown-up posters of golden-age Korean movie stars posted outside as well as papering the walls within. If you are not Korean, the valet will give you a quizzical look as you step out of your car. Inside the close quarters of the wood-paneled tavern, a squad of aunties in the open kitchen prod and poke at whole grilling squids and smoking cookpots whose rattling lids can be heard even above the din of the Korean dance music. The walls are streaked with graffiti. The untranslated menu, such as it is, is laminated onto a block of wood. It is as if you have ducked out of Sixth Street into a smoky bar in Seoul.

“This place is supposed to be themed after an old movie theater in Seoul,” says the guy sitting next to you at the counter. “In my opinion, it attracts too many old people. But then again . . . look at these girls!”

Yet Dansungsa may be the friendliest place in Koreatown. In no time at all, a waiter will have you set up with platters of the bar snacks known as anju: maybe that barbecued squid, thick fingers of rice cake glazed with a lip-searing chile sauce, or skewers of grilled shrimp, grilled garlic cloves, or something that looks and tastes very much like a grilled Ball Park Frank. With your soju or beer comes painfully rustic turnip kimchi and a bowl of spicy cabbage soup. Before you leave, you probably will have toasted to the health of the people at the tables on either side of you and eaten a massive, crisp seafood pancake laced with scallions, a plate of steamed baby octopus, or some truly wonderful grilled pork ribs, the bar’s specialty. But don’t aim too high on the food chain: “You want chap chae?” a waiter sneered. “Not here — that’s restaurant food.” 3317 W. Sixth St., (213) 487-9100.

NOODLES FROM A DIFFERENT KITCHEN

Chinese restaurants in Koreatown tend to be pretty different from Chinese restaurants not in Koreatown, weighted toward the sticky and the sweet, big on the deep-frying, and given to a palate-cleanser of raw slivered onions served with hoisin sauce. More to the point, they are some of the only Chinese restaurants in Southern California where the noodles are characteristically pulled by hand, and the spaghetti-shaped strands are stretchy, bouncy things, perfectly al dente, with a slight surface tackiness and a nicely developed wheat flavor, almost good enough to eat by themselves. Mandarin House specializes in chachiang mein, a big bowl of those hand-pulled noodles served in a musky, tar-black sauce made with onions, fermented black beans, and meat — a sauce so popular that you can even buy warm packets of the freshly made goo in the deli cases of a few Koreatown supermarkets. You’ll find chachiang mein practically everywhere in Koreatown, but the version at Mandarin House is supreme. 3074 W. Eighth St., (213) 386-8976.

KIM BOP-A-LULA

In a quiet, almost deserted mall at midday, you walk past fancy dress shops, bridal salons, an herb shop and a bakery. In the small, rustic restaurant at one end of the gallery, Chung Moo Kim Bop House, you slide onto a bench. Seconds later, a waitress sets in front of you a bowl of pickled radish, a bowl of spicy broth, a bowl of crunchy tentacles in a sweet chile sauce, and an oblong dish on which 10 slender sushi rolls — kim bop — line up like so many laver-green soldiers. The rice is significantly less seasoned than Japanese sushi rice, if at all, and the sticky seaweed wrappers are not particularly well toasted. You might fail to see the point of the dish. Still, 10 minutes from now, after you have experienced every possible permutation of tentacle, kim bop and broth, you may well worship the stuff. If you are honest with yourself, raw sea urchin eggs weren’t that appealing the first time around, either. 3030 W. Olympic Blvd., No. 108, (213) 382-8277.

BEAN THERE, DONE THAT

My friend Caryl has always maintained that So Kong Dong was the best tofu restaurant in Koreatown. I have always plumped for Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant across the street. So Kong Dong seems almost Soviet in its appearance, a low-ceilinged dining room bathed in a singularly unappealing fluorescent glare. Beverly looks as if its proprietor went overboard on the burl-log furniture for sale by the side of the road in Topanga. So Kong Dong serves its rice in superheated stone pots that give it a subtly smoky flavor. Beverly’s rice is served in the same stainless-steel bowls you find everywhere in Koreatown. So Kong Dong includes briny pickled clams among its panchan. Beverly’s panchan is pretty much by the book.

So Kong Dong’s signature tofu casserole, soontofu, is a marvelous thing, bubbling and sputtering in its red-hot bowl, robustly flavored with shrimp and clams and oysters and beef, walloped with chile and garlic. Beverly’s soontofu is a little tamer, the broth more briny than complex, like an austere French bouillon as compared to a concentrated California-style stock fortified with tomato paste and fistfuls of herbs. So Kong Dong would seem to win on points. Yet the tofu itself, freshly made every day at both restaurants, is smooth and supple at Beverly, barely gelled blocks of pure, subtle flavor that melt into an elusive milkiness in your mouth, where at So Kong Dong the tofu tends to be kind of . . . curdy. You’ll still find me at Beverly. But I wouldn’t blame you if you ended up across the street with Caryl instead. So Kong Dong, 2716 W. Olympic Blvd., No. 104, (213) 380-3737; Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant, 2717 W. Olympic Blvd., No. 108 (213) 380-1113.