Ddo-Wa: Where They Do Korean Dumplings Right

Where even the tiniest Chinese restaurant seems to serve an encyclopedic variety of dishes, listed on eight-page menus and supplemented by a dozen or so wall signs, informal Korean restaurants tend to specialize.

Some Korean cafes in Los Angeles sell nothing but soybean gruel, and another’s menu is pretty much limited to beef soup. There’s a Korean goat restaurant on Olympic, some Korean-style tapas bars and many, many lunch counters where noodles are king. To novices, even some grand Korean banquet rooms can seem like specialty restaurants, where the only thing on the carte du jour is barbecued beef.

Wedged into one of those doughnut-anchored mid-Wilshire mini-malls, across the street from a Salvadoran pupuseria and occupying a tiny storefront once home to a Syrian falafel stand, six-table Ddo-Wa is the kind of Korean specialty restaurant anybody can live with, concentrating not on fish parts or on ox fondue, but on that universal favorite, the dumpling. The Korean version is called mandoo .

Ddo-Wa’s gaudy yellow and orange exterior is identified only by a sign in Korean--well, that and a picture on the mall’s signboard of a boy gobbling mandoo --but everybody in this extremely multiethnic community seems to have discovered the place. Latino office workers and burly Anglo jarheads munch on dumplings as greedily as the gaggles of schoolgirls from the massive synagogue-turned-Korean Presbyterian church down the street. Stroller-pushing women stagger away under the weight of huge take-out orders.

The menu here is simplicity itself: steamed, boiled, fried or in soup. If that’s too complicated, a photograph of each dish is displayed on the rear wall. For the nearsighted, individual picture menus are available.

When you sit down, you are served a lagniappe of yellow pickled daikon, or perhaps a little plate of kimchi. The beverage of choice seems to be tap water, poured into a plastic cup, or nothing more exotic than 7-Up.

As you’d expect, though, the mandoo --sort of D-battery-size variants on the meat-filled Chinese potsticker, amped up with garlic and herbs--are wonderful, plump and savory. When you bite down into the crisp skin of a fried dumpling, hot juice spurts across the table, and you burn your tongue. The boiled dumplings are soft, definitely spoon food, better enjoyed with the milky-white beef broth and bits of seaweed in the dumpling soup.

The steamed are firm, a little chewy maybe, and even more delicious dipped in a tincture of vinegar, soy and powdered cayenne. (Once, as a prank, somebody had unscrewed the lid on the cayenne shaker, and the whole thing poured out onto my plate. Six months later, I think the people who work there may have finally stopped snickering.)

Though an order of any of these is enough for a light meal, you can follow your dumplings with some fried cuttlefish, kind of like greasy Korean calamari , or else there’s Korean sushi, which is a seaweed-wrapped sushi roll stuffed with fish cake and Korean pickles. The sugary, Korean-style grilled short ribs with rice aren’t great (this is a specialty restaurant), but there is a pretty good $6.75 combination platter that gives you a little taste of everything in a big wooden tray.

But the best thing in the restaurant, better than the dumplings even, is something Ddo-Wa calls rice cake--rice noodles, thick as a finger, with fish cake and fried vegetables in a chile-red miso sauce, as hot and sweet as . . . well, you know.

Ddo-Wa Restaurant, 3542 W. Third St., Los Angeles, (213) 387-1288. Open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Lot parking. Takeout. Cash only. Lunch for two, food only, $8-$13.50.