FISH TO STEW FOR TWO : KOREAN FOOD OFFERED WITH BARBECUE OPTION

Nearly 30 items on the Inchon Won menu are not even rendered in our alphabet. Aha, adventure! I pointed at a line of Korean letters. “This,” I said forcefully.

My waitress writhed in distress. Apologizing for her English, she at last said, “Only for Korean people.”

How dare she, I thought, and asked, “What is it?”

“Fish dish. You know what is intestines?”

Well, yes, I do. And I definitely will order that dish--someday, I fully assure you, when I’m quite ready.

I thought I knew Korean food: a simple cuisine, heavy on the garlic, vinegar and red pepper; lots of barbecued meats, and lots of side dishes served with every entree, including pickled cabbage with a rank aroma that everybody complains about but becomes addicted to.

I was in for surprises here, though. Inchon Won in Garden Grove isn’t a plain little mom-and-pop place. It’s quite large and has both regular tables and those with gas jet barbecues--in case you want to grill your own food. It even has two raised Oriental rooms where you take off your shoes before entering and sit on a cushion before a low table, with or without a gas jet barbecue. (Over each barbecue there is an amazing mechanized smoke hood that can be raised or lowered by pressing a button.)

The big surprise was the menu, which is more exotic than most of the menus I’ve seen in Los Angeles’ Koreatown and as far off the beaten track as the fare found in some of Orange County’s Vietnamese eateries. The Korean barbecue dishes Americans find so easy to like are just about the smallest section on Inchon Won’s menu.

There are fish dishes, mostly raw fish (called “sliced fish” here) that are similar to Japanese sashimi , served with the same soy sauce and poisonous green horseradish. But since this is a Korean restaurant, you can also doctor them with red-hot pepper paste. You get romaine lettuce, too, which I assumed was for wrapping the fish. It worked all right.

There are cooked dishes as well, including a tasty one of enjoyably chewy stewed octopus with carrot and red bell pepper slices, plus a lot of garlic, red pepper and sesame seed. The sure-fire crowd-pleasers--barbecued beef, chicken and pork items. Listed above them, though, are more unusual items, such as the delicious red snapper bathed in a sauce of soy, lots of red pepper and garlic, and thickly covered with chopped green onions.

Another winner is “palace stew” (for two). It’s a little thinner than a stew, but is packed with white noodles, mushrooms, beef, shrimp, fish, snails (not the usual French escargots, but a helix-shaped snail with a little trap-door protecting its chewy meat) and the usual green onions, pepper and garlic. No one should have any problem with kook man doo, either, which are particularly good beef wontons in excellent beef broth.

This, however, is a restaurant for adventurers. Some real surprises are to be found among the rice and noodle selections. I cannot resist any dish with a name such “pickled crab with baek ban.” But while this peppery soup was palatable, the pickled crab, which bore the same flavor relationship to fresh crab that salt fish has to fresh fish, was just not as much fun as fresh crab would have been.

Also, I’d say my waitress was wrong to warn me that “cold noodles” were terribly spicy. The real problem was that these transparent vermicelli readily stick together, but slip between your chopsticks. It’s like trying to pluck clothes out of a washing machine with a pair of foot rulers.

One of the great pleasures of Korean food is pan ch’an , the array of side dishes that come with your entree and partly take the place of appetizers (there are no courses in a Korean meal, since everything’s served at the same time). You get at least seven pan ch’an at Inchon Won, a selection that seems to change at every meal.

Perennials are the cabbage kim ch’i, pickled turnip, bean sprouts and spinach dressed with sesame oil. For the rest, you may find pickled radish, sweet crystalline strands of seaweed, green beans in red pepper paste, tiny sweet soybeans, or various omelets (with fish or vegetables) and peculiar pastas (translucent spaghetti, white disks with red spirals in them, or odd, transparent white oblongs topped with green onions).

One of the things my party insisted on trying was a rice drink named yakchu. The waitress did her best to talk us out of it (it’s one of the items not spelled in English); but in fact, it was not at all bad, sort of like a light, low-alcohol sake served cold. It turns out to be a medicinal drink, but with the absence of desserts in Korean food, yakchu might serve to end a meal. The waitress also came up with a sweet rice drink that was a little thicker and tasted as if it had almond in it, which could assuage a Yankee sweet tooth.

Prices are very reasonable. Most entrees (meaning the whole dinner, since there’s no separate appetizer category) are in the range of $5.50 to $9, although a few special items go as high as $17.95.

INCHON WON RESTAURANT 13321 Brookhurst St., Garden Grove

(714) 539-8989 or 539-8990

Open for lunch Monday through Saturday, for dinner daily until 1 a.m. Master Card and Visa accepted.