RESTAURANTS : GRILLS, CHILLS AND KIMCHEE : Familiar, Friendly and Beefy, Korean Food Deserves a Much Wider Audience

I’ve never been to a Korean restaurant,” said the first person I took to dinner at Woo Lae Oak.

“I’ve never been to a Korean restaurant,” said the second person I took to dinner at Woo Lae Oak.

“I’ve never been to a Korean restaurant,” said the third, the fourth and the fifth. In a city with about 500 Korean restaurants, this is surprising.

It’s even more surprising when you consider that Korean food, unlike some of the more arcane cuisines we’ve recently embraced, does not contain ingredients that most Americans would consider strange. In the past 10 years, we have managed to overcome our suspicions about uncooked fish and have put a sushi bar on every street corner. Our enthusiasm for Thai cooking is so strong that we’ve overlooked our national aversion to sauces made from fermented fish. Indian pickles, Jamaican curries and Persian pilafs no longer seem exotic. Yet easy-to-love Korean cuisine, based on beef and grilled on the barbecue, is almost unknown in mainstream America.

Woo Lae Oak wants to change all that. The latest restaurant in the chain is not in Koreatown, but right on Restaurant Row. It has granite tables, seasoned waiters and a wine list filled with the right stuff. The dishes on the menu are described in terms that would surprise most Koreans: the venerable juk-- a rice porridge found in one form or another in every Asian country--has suddenly turned into “risotto.” Mandu --the ubiquitous Korean dumplings--have become tortellini. Galettes and paupiettes are sprinkled liberally about the menu; perhaps this absurd attempt at cross-culturalism makes the food seem friendly--but it can be misleading.

Most Korean food has a robust quality, but at Woo Lae Oak it has an uncharacteristic delicacy, most evident in a dish such as chap chae-- ordinarily little more than a Korean version of chow mein with clear noodles. Here the noodles are stir-fried with vegetables and soy sauce and then rolled up in thinly sliced daikon so that they look like aristocratic little egg rolls. On their own, they are subtle; dipped into the fiery red pepper sauce, they take on a more ferocious aspect.

Spicy hotness is one face of Korean cooking; sweetness is another. Koreans are famous for their beef tartare, usually sliced into slivers rather than ground into mush, then marinated in an appealingly sweet, sesame-scented sauce. The beef tartare at Woo Lae Oak is very good, but the tuna tartare is extraordinary. Crisp Asian pears are shaved into long strands, then topped with ice-cold strips of raw tuna. A few pine nuts (another Korean staple) are strewn across the top. It’s the sort of dish you urge your fish-hating friends to try because it’s so delicious, and so delicate, that you can’t imagine anybody disliking it.

You do have to like fish to be impressed by bin dae duk , a sort of pancake made of ground mung beans, scallions, kimchee and bean sprouts. This is a fairly common Korean dish, but here the kitchen has given the rustic dish an upscale interpretation, topping each pancake with tiny oysters.

But this upscale urge only goes so far. Any Italian food fan ordering jon bok juk and expecting the announced “risotto” is in for a disappointment. This really is the Asian porridge--soupier than risotto, with the textural edge coming not from the rice but from intriguingly chewy bits of abalone. It’s a fine dish, but it’s not risotto. The mandu were also a stretch. The kitchen has tried hard to make the dumplings into tortellini, filling them with shrimp and stir-frying them with various baby vegetables. But the dumplings are rather awkward and slightly heavy; no Italian would want to claim them.

But everybody who likes to eat will like the barbecue that anchors the menu at Woo Lae Oak. The center of each table opens up to reveal a built-in grill; there are about a dozen different meats and fish you can order to throw onto it. You can find Korean barbecue in hundreds of places in Southern California, but it’s rarely of this exalted quality. Order the scallops, for instance, and you get big, juicy slices that taste as if they have just emerged from the ocean. Kal bi-- marinated, boneless short ribs--is extraordinarily tender meat.

The loin of lamb has the perfect funkiness of sheep, and the chicken tastes delicious.

The meat comes, as it does at all Korean barbecue restaurants, with big leaves of lettuce; the idea is to make yourself a sort of taco with the meat, the condiments and the lettuce. (If you want to skip the sauce and the lettuce, you can just throw the meat onto the rice that also comes with each order of barbecue.) The pungent sauce next to the lettuce is one clue to the reason why Korea is famous for the quantity of garlic consumed in the country. The kimchee is another.

In most Korean restaurants, you get a large array of the marinated vegetables called kimchee. Here you get just two. One is the intensely hot cabbage-and-chile condiment that is the hallmark of Korean cooking; the other is a dish of bland marinated radish. I found myself missing the variety of vegetables.

There is also a spread of “traditional specialties,” from cold buckwheat noodles with sliced beef to bi bim bap, a bowl of rice mixed with a vegetable, fried egg and a sweetly spicy sauce. This last is immensely satisfying. The “fish specialties,” the kitchen’s nod to California cuisine, are fine, but why would you want to eat striped bass with pesto when the menu lists so many more interesting choices?

Each time I’ve been to Woo Lae Oak, I’ve asked for one of the hot pots on the menu; each time, I’ve been told that the restaurant didn’t have any. I’m not sure I believe this; I suspect that the waiter just didn’t think it was safe to bring me a bowl of broth filled with tripe, intestines, vegetables and noodles. He was wrong, but given how long most of us have taken to come around to Korean cuisine, I don’t blame him.

I know I’ll have to prove myself. I look forward to it.