ZONE DIET
More than a dozen years after its opening, the Safety Zone Café is still a Smithsonian-quality masterpiece of bad 1970s restaurant design, down to the distressed bronze-look plastic, and the frothy colored drinks that look alarmingly like Brandy Alexanders . . . all that’s missing is an engraved Oly mirror or two. A hidden club within the restaurant supposedly borrows its motifs from the lower-school Korean classroom. A tent in the back, the hip place to be, is home to fair-to-middling codfish stew, very decent dumpling soup, and okay bulgogi. A dozen years later, the specialty is probably steak and potatoes, done more in the style of a Midwestern roadhouse than a charcoal pit in Seoul. But you’ve got to give the Safety Zone some props: In Paxton, Nebraska, there is just no way you’re going to be able to order a platter of sautéed octopus on the side. 3630 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 387-7595.
SOUP IS GOO FOOD
In Seoul, there is reputedly a Hangover Alley, a narrow downtown street lined on both sides with restaurants dedicated to the art of the curative tonics known collectively as gomtang. In Koreatown, there is Jinju Gomtang, a 24-hour café devoted to pale bone broths garnished with oxtail or sliced brisket, as bland as oatmeal and twice as soothing. But the real specialty of the place, a soup you might consider having for lunch even if you weren’t on the wrong side of a bottle of dong dong ju, is the spicy haejanguk, a pottage of cabbage, chiles, scallions, garlic in a funky-fresh cow-part broth, garnished with little clots of blood and ready to come alive with the addition of a little sea salt and a lot of the restaurant’s house-made chile paste. 610 S. Western Ave., (213) 383-6789.
THE CHOSUN PEOPLE
For decades, Woo Lae Oak on Western was the favorite Korean restaurant of people who didn’t like Korean food all that much, a fancy place where they could convince themselves that galbi wasn’t all that different from an ordinary steak dinner. (Mostly because it wasn’t: The restaurant’s pallid galbi very much resembled the London broil at any number of steak houses.) Now that the Koreatown Woo Lae Oak is on hiatus for a year or so, the conservative Koreatown choice is probably Chosun Galbi, which has the patio-side glamour of a Beverly Hills garden party, granite tables, gorgeous waitresses, and expensive, well-marbled meat that glows as pinkly as a Tintoretto cherub. Make sure to throw some shrimp on the barbie, too — the pricey little beasties crisp up like a dream. 3330 W. Olympic Blvd., (323) 734-3330.
PRINCE CHARMING
Imagine a Korean pub shoehorned into the fanciest restaurant in Los Angeles circa 1953, complete with the lawn jockeys at the top of the stairs and oil paintings of earls above the oxblood leather banquettes. The food, you understand, is not exactly the point at the Prince, which seems to specialize in sugary stir-fries and American dishes that might have been inspired by Quad Cities Rotary banquet menus. The basic unit of currency here is the kimchi pancake, a thin mass of egg batter laced with fermented cabbage, lashed together with scallions, then fried to an exquisite, oily crispness. Kimchi pancakes come free with your drinks, which makes sense, because the greasy heat of the things is enough to power you through an entire double-size bottle of Korean Hite beer. 3198 1/2 W. Seventh St., (213) 389-2007.
DEM BONES
Han Bat, hidden on a side street of the Western Avenue drag, is a shrine to the cult of Korean beef soup, sullongtang, to the extent that there is barely no other food served, no other food needed. Good sullongtang, which is completely without fat, is an incandescent, glowing white, the result of long, patient cooking and the essence of many bones. Before it was largely supplanted by Vietnamese pho in Koreatown, sullongtang, which also carries a payload of thin noodles, sliced brisket, and various organs if you want it that way, was as locally popular as ramen is in Little Tokyo. The soup is unsalted: You season it to taste with a half-teaspoon or so of coarse salt from a container on the table. You also add loads of freshly chopped scallion greens, which soften quickly in the hot broth, and possibly a spoonful of the chile paste, which tints the soup flamingo pink. Flamingo pink: the color of victory. 4163 W. Fifth St., (213) 383-9499.
WATCHING THE
PHO FLY
As delicious as a bowl of sullongtang can be, it is incontrovertible: The sharp mineral smack of long-boiled beef bones is distinctly not to everybody’s taste. Gently spiced Vietnamese pho, on the other hand, may be the greatest beef-bone soup in the world, mellowed with cinnamon and star anise, roundly meaty from long simmering, and garnished with a lavish variety of cattle parts and a salad bowl’s-worth of herbs. So it was probably only a matter of time before the Korean community clasped pho to its bosom, and more than a dozen Vietnamese noodle shops, most of them operating 24 hours a day, speckle the boulevards of Koreatown. None of these pho shops is quite up to the standards of Golden Deli or Pho 79, but there are worse places to end up at 4 in the morning than at one of the various locations of Pho 2000, soaking up the excess soju with a warm bowl of noodles. 215 N. Western Ave., (323) 461-5845, and other locations.
PANCHAN PLAN
To connoisseurs, a restaurant is best judged by the quality of its panchan, the little dishes of kimchi and other preserved foods laid out at the beginning of a Korean meal. And panchan rarely come any better than they do at Sa Rit Gol — the candied dried fish, the crisp water kimchi of radish, the chile-marinated squid, even the ordinary cabbage kimchi, are admired by the kind of old-line Korean traditionalists who insist on making their own kimchi, miso, and soy sauce, at home. But even if your own exposure to panchan extends no further than a couple of excursions to Soot Bull Jeep, you are still likely to recognize the focused tanginess and the careful, freshness-preserving fermentation of the kimchi at Sa Rit Gol as extraordinarily good. Sa Rit Gol is indeed one of the best restaurants in Koreatown, a rustic joint still decorated with raw wood and Korean beer posters, full of two-fisted drinkers, locally famous for its spicy pork barbecue, grilled belly pork and grilled pike — classic drinking food — as well as bubbling crab casseroles, black-cod soups and braised shiitake mushrooms with spinach. 3189 W. Olympic Blvd.; (213) 387-0909.
OLD KING COAL
Natural-charcoal barbecue, which is to say the atavistic pleasure of grilling meat over live coals, is traditionally kind of a cheap thrill. Such barbecuing as practiced at fancier Korean restaurants is usually done over well-ventilated gas grills, which are much less likely to leave your favorite blouse perforated with tiny holes like a silk colander. The newish, marble-encrusted Tahoe Galbi, another of those Koreatown restaurants that seem to be all patio, may be the first place in town where it is possible to enjoy both the superb meat characteristic of the best Korean restaurants and the smoky kick of live-fire cooking — and when you bite into the galbi, Korean short ribs, they flood your mouth with sweet juice. 3986 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 365-9000.
RAW POWER
Korean sushi occupies something of an alternate universe, where raw fish is served up in truck-driver slabs, pungent flavors are prized, and drinks are remarkably strong. If you can imagine relishing a bit of raw tilefish wrapped in a lettuce leaf with sliced jalapeño chiles, a raw garlic clove and a smear of stinky bean paste, Korean sushi may be for you. (I happen to love the stuff.) Japanese sushi bacchanals may involve a few exquisite grams of a severely endangered mullet; Korean ones tend to include the meat from a massive, whole flatfish that was alive at the beginning of dinner service.
There is a lot of Korean-style sushi in Koreatown, and I have had more than decent meals at Dok Sun, across from the La Curacao department store, at Haneda Sushi on Wilshire and at the late Living Fish Center, but Bu San is my favorite Korean sushi place — tell one of the chefs you are interested in Korean-style sushi, and he’ll set you up with a meal from the fourth dimension: sashimi with sliced chiles and whole cloves of raw garlic; raw sea cucumber in fermented bean paste; tuna with kimchi and live halibut sliced into sashimi before your eyes. Awesome. 201 N. Western Ave., (323) 871-0703.
BEAR NIGHT
There are many reasons to fall in love with OB Bear, a venerable Koreatown tavern across the street from Southwestern Law School. You may admire the spicy squid served with noodles, the kebabs, or the roast chicken. You may be intrigued with the bar’s charming version of buffalo wings, which are as sticky and peppery and oily as the original, only more so. Something about the setup of the place seems to encourage the intake of intoxicating liquids, and it is easy to find yourself ordering frankly unwise amounts of whiskey, or personal kegs of beer so large that they dwarf the rather small tabletops, which can make any evening more entertaining. We are shallow and easily amused. To us, it is enough that this cheerful den of inebriation is located directly below the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. 3002 W. Seventh St., (213) 480-4910.
SHAKE YOUR THING
A particular version of postmodernism is being played out at Nandarang, which, in its indoor-outdoor architecture, its video screens and its neo-retro-futuristic furniture, is more or less a California take on the Korean version of a Japanese update of the sort of midcentury Scandinavian design that was probably riffing on California to begin with. Tables are crowded with both French fries and plates of kimchi, fizzy soju drinks and frothing vats of Bud. But as the Koreatown answer to Pop’s Chocklit Shop in Betty and Veronica’s Riverdale, what Nandarang mostly has is mobs of teenagers out way past their bedtime, grooving on dance-club records and consuming dangerous quantities of the café’s signature coffee-banana shakes. 3811 W. Sixth St., (213) 388-8513.
BADA BINGSU
No discussion of Koreatown cuisine would be complete without mention of bingsu, an overwrought construction of sweet beans, canned fruit cocktail, ice cream, whipped cream and crushed ice, just to mention the basics. A properly made bingsu, which will often be larger than your head, brings casual conversation to a halt. Practically every café in Koreatown has bingsu somewhere on its menu. But the version served at Ice Kiss, a bingsu specialist near the Chapman Market, is garnished with a handful of Technicolor confetti that look and taste an awful lot like Fruity Pebbles. If you’re going to eat like a 6-year-old, you might as well go all the way. 3407 W. Sixth St., (213) 382-4776.
MUNG THE MAGNIFICENT
Kobawoo, which started out as a greasy spoon almost two decades ago, has mellowed into a Koreatown institution, a polished, respectable destination restaurant with some of the best food in the neighborhood at prices almost unbelievably low. Kobawoo has a decent chicken soup, and it is a great place to try the standard called bossam, a sort of combo plate of oysters, sliced pork belly and ultraspicy kimchi. The funky communal pot of bean-paste chigae, or stew, which follows the entrée at a lot of restaurants, is spicy and delicious. The pig’s feet have their fans. But it’s still the home-style pindaeduk, mung-bean pancakes, that keep drawing me back to Kobawoo — the pancakes are ethereal beneath their thin veneer of crunch, melting away almost instantly in the mouth like a sort of intriguingly flavored polenta. 698 S. Vermont Ave., (213) 389-7300.
CABBAGE PATCH
Near the cash register at the bakery Cake Town Garden is a glass warming case, filled with what look like the most beautiful jelly doughnuts you have ever seen: expertly fried, a gorgeous golden brown, and flat as a stack of CDs. They smell great, too — the folks at Cake Town are nothing if not masters of all things doughy. But when you finally get one of them out to the car, you may be in for a surprise. Because despite their appearance, these babies are not filled with jelly, custard or even sweetened beans, but a cabbagey vegetable stew. Oddly, this is not disappointing. 551 S. Western Ave., (213) 480-1010.
UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS
On weekends, the line to get into Dae Sung Oak usually winds out onto the sidewalk, and the tabletop barbecue, the kimchi stew and the naengmyon, cold buckwheat noodles with raw stingray, served in the posh upstairs dining room are pretty good. Unusually for Koreatown, where restaurants tend to be inward-looking fortresses, there is a view out onto the busy street below. The panchan includes little bowls of spicy pickled crab. But the soups here, the mainstay of the downstairs dining room, are even better than the upstairs galbi, especially a version of sullongtang that fixes the specific mellowness of beef brisket with the loving exactness Raphael once applied to memorializing his lover’s smile. 2585 W. Olympic Blvd., (213) 386-1600.
HAVE A RICE DAY
Bibimbap, a dish of rice mixed at the table with vegetables, chile paste and perhaps a fried egg, is reputed to be the Korean staple most suited to the Western palate, the dish that may someday be as popular among Californians as the pizza or the teriyaki stick. Yet some of the worst Asian meals I have ever eaten have come from Koreatown bibimbap specialists, including the mall restaurant whose 20-item bibimbap tasted like leftovers scraped from a fast-food salad bar, and a popular bibimbap chain whose gooey specialty proved uniquely inedible. The kitchen-sink aspect of the dish tends to play into the worst tendencies of a particular type of cook. But in the right restaurant, bibimbap can be fairly spectacular, the flavors of the vegetables heightened and melded by the heat of the chile paste, the different intensities of crunch becoming almost contrapuntal under the teeth. I especially like the variation called dol sot bibimbap, served in an ultraheated stone pot that creates a crisp, slightly scorched crust where the mixture hits the stone and infuses the rice with a subtly pervasive smokiness. The bibimbap at Jeon Ju, a restaurant from the southern area of Korea where the dish originated, is perfect. And don’t miss Jeon Ju’s spicy cod stew, which may be the best in Koreatown. 2716 W. Olympic Blvd., (213) 386-5678.