A Taste of Old Korea

A Korean restaurant often feels like a men’s club. Unaccompanied women diners are likely to be as rare as hot winter days in Seoul. But the waiters are a different matter--they’ll probably all be women.

And so it is at Yet Gol Restaurant in Gardena, where a highly efficient team of women wait the tables. Their service is mannered and elegant: They pour your drinks, adjust the flame on your table’s barbecue grill and pamper you with extra panchan, that panoply of side dishes that completes any Korean meal.

Yet Gol (old town) is a fitting name for this charming little place, because it’s imbued with the look and feel of old Korea. You sit in lacquered wooden booths on cushions embroidered in autumnal colors. The room is lit by paper lanterns. The air is filled with the scent of food sizzling on red-hot cast-iron griddles brought out from the kitchen.

The dishes of a Korean meal are served as soon as they’re ready, rather than in a series of separate courses. And one of the best reasons to eat here is the colorful and varied selection of panchan that arrive immediately after the drinks.

One evening, the selection consisted of sliced squid in a pungent red bean sauce, cucumbers with dark soy sauce and jalapeno chiles, spears of asparagus in hot bean paste, chopped white radishes, the obligatory pickled cabbage (kimchi), and a dish of julienned ham and bamboo shoots drizzled with sesame oil.

On top of that, there were two dishes you rarely see in this country. One was dotori muk: grayish cubes of acorn flour jelly. The other was a sesame leaf with a persistent salty flavor--it had been marinated in brine. Both were smeared with a fiery paste of ground chiles and sesame seeds, and I found myself calling for a second bottle of Hite Korean beer in record time.

These side dishes are uncommonly light--appetizers in the truest sense. By contrast, Korean main dishes can be among the heartiest in Asia. One very good one is haemul pajon, a huge seafood pancake brought to the table still frying on one of those red-hot iron griddles. It’s laced with chopped oysters, clams, squid, octopus and sea bass. Your waitress cuts you a wedge and hands you a bottle of hot bean paste to squirt on it.

A lighter pancake entree is kamjajon, a simple, crepe-like cake of potato flour and green onions; it’s delicious with cold beer. You can also get one of the most famous Korean pub dishes, dwaejigul bosom: steamed oysters and barbecued pork wrapped up in Napa cabbage. If you want a hot soup, you can’t go wrong with ugoji guk, a wholesome vegetarian porridge of soy beans and cabbage.

Yet Gol serves a wide menu of barbecued meats and rice dishes, but the kitchen wisely gives you the choice of cooking the meat yourself on your table’s barbecue grill or leaving the work to the chefs. Fun as it is to play with your food, I think the cooks are likely to do a better job, and a lot of the customers here evidently agree.

As you’d expect, there is bulkogi, the grilled beef served at nearly every Korean restaurant. And this is a nearly perfect rendition, the meat tender and properly blackened, flavorful with garlic and sesame, and served on a sizzling iron plate along with sliced onions.

My very favorite dish in this restaurant is Yet Gol kalbi jim: ultra-tender braised beef short ribs in a thick, fire-engine red sauce of sesame paste and red pepper. The waitress cuts the meat off the ribs for you one by one, with large shears. Another reliably tasty choice is dak gui, which is boneless pieces of chicken treated much like the bulkogi.

Among the dishes that aren’t barbecued, I like haemul and kalbi dolsot bibimbap. They are iron kettles of rice topped with either minced seafood (that’s the haemul) or grilled beef short ribs (the kalbi), plus bean sprouts, mushrooms, spinach and laver seaweed. The sides of the pot are so hot the rice forms a wonderful golden-brown crust while you eat.

After dinner, you might try the rice wine, a moonshine-like elixir served from a ceramic bowl with a curved wooden spoon. At the finish, they bring you a sweet rice punch called sikhye, pieces of sugared puffed rice and sticks of coffee-flavored chewing gum. If that is just too macho, you can always draw the line at the coffee-flavored gum.

BE THERE

Yet Gol Restaurant, 1835 Redondo Beach Blvd., Gardena. (310) 329-7343. Open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday. Parking in lot. Beer and wine only. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, $28 to $45. What to Get: haemul pajon, ugoji guk, dolsot bibimbap, Yet Gol kalbi jim, dwaejigul bosom.