The Kimchi Connection

At dusk, electronic billboards light up all along Vermont and Western avenues. Their glowing images flick and spin, pumping life into Korean-language signs advertising everything from karaoke bars to old-country herbal cures. The aroma of garlic wafts out of countless restaurants over the largest Korean enclave outside Asia.

Even in the late ‘70s, when Korean business had barely put down roots here, the 5 square miles between Pico Boulevard and Melrose Avenue from Hoover Street to Crenshaw Boulevard were home to more eating places than Chinatown. In the last 10 years, growth has escalated at a turbocharged pace. Daniel Oh, president of the National Korean Restaurant Coalition, points out that in 1992, Koreatown had 160 restaurants; now it has 450. The streets are ablaze with restaurant “grand opening” banners. Dinner-time traffic can be a madhouse, with mini-mall parking lot attendants heroically juggling twice as many cars as the lots can hold.

The Ambassador district along Wilshire Boulevard is Koreatown’s newest status address. Here the ghostly closed Perino’s and shuttered Cocoanut Grove nightclub recall the glamour era of wining and dining Hollywood royalty. The office towers that emptied in the ‘80s, when many Fortune 500 companies moved away, now hold Korean banks and professional offices. At the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Alexandria Avenue, the Brown Derby Plaza, built on the site of the illustrious restaurant where the Cobb salad was born, is filled with Korean-owned pubs, discos and eating spots.

Morangak, on the top floor, serving dishes from the North Korean city of Pyongyang, is patterned after a chain in South Korea. The laminated menu pictures the principal dishes: dumplings stuffed with pheasant, regional noodle bowls, the colorful vegetable dish goldongban and a fabulous stew of six or seven kinds of wild mushroom in a deeply flavored beef broth.

Up the street at the Wilshire B.B.Q. House, businesspeople are still finalizing deals at 2 a.m. In time-honored tradition they converse over soju--aptly called Korean vodka--and spicy dried octopus or seafood pancakes.

At Wilshire and Kingsley, you can sit down to a bubbling caldron of soon dubu (sometimes spelled sun dubu) 24 hours a day at BCD Tofu House. The fresh soft tofu is infused with a ferocious chile broth served so hot it cooks the raw egg served on the side. There’s a choice of meats, seafood and vegetable toppings.

There are many soon dubu shops around Koreatown, but this branch of the six-restaurant BCD chain is so busy you often have to take a number. An enormous backlighted menu over the service area shows each dish, so you can order as soon as you sit down. Though the huge place is a model of efficiency, the decor conjures up Korea’s rural past with burnished photos of traditionally dressed folk engaged in tofu making. There is even entertainment: A live jazz combo plays Thursday evenings.

Entertainment, in fact, is one of Koreatown’s important draws, and there’s something here for every taste, from pubs and coffeehouses to indoor golf driving ranges. Last year, says Oh, the three major nightclubs, Prive, Megga and Velfarre, grossed more than $9 million.

At Chapman Market on 6th Street, the young hip crowd gathering on the Italianate cobblestone courtyard inside this beautifully restored ‘30s-era complex can choose from about a dozen eateries and boutiques.

At the east end of the market, a large, dimly lit cafe named Intercrew throbs with rock music until 2 a.m. It serves light, primarily Korean meals, but hamburger steak and kimchi spaghetti hold prominent places on the menu.

At the other end of the courtyard, late-night couples and fashion-conscious singles gather over coffees at Bosco Cake Salon while, across the patio, the Bohemian, a drinking lounge, bristles with suave dressers. Sitting in plush booths under a cloud-painted ceiling, they order chicken wings and kimchi fried rice. Other snacks from the long menu accompany draft beer by the pitcher and whiskey by the bottle (one is not expected to drink alone).

Farther west on 6th Street are several casual pubs. It’s impossible to miss Dan Sung Sa, covered with realistic paintings of Korean entertainers. The interior has rustic roughhewn wood walls. From 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., it serves beer and soju along with 50 types of anju, Korean pub food such as shish kebabs, rice cake soup and raw eel, at prices ranging from $1.99 to $20.99. The waiters will translate the Korean-language menu.

All over Koreatown, restaurants are updating to appeal to an increasingly sophisticated clientele. A few years ago, one of Koreatown’s oldest tabletop barbecue places, Korean Gardens, transformed itself into Yongsusan. It hired the Julia Child of Kaesong-style cuisine, Sang Ock Choi, to advise.

Kaesong’s former position as a North Korean trading city drew well-to-do merchants for whom the cooking was refined. These refinements are evident in Yongsusan’s food. Its hallmarks are meticulously cut vegetables, naeng myun noodles as fine as angel hair and deft presentations.

The restaurant’s lavish apricot silk-walled dining room and discreet private rooms are the perfect setting for the multi-course chong shik-style meals priced from $19 to $50.

The rather formal older Korean restaurant On Sarabul has morphed into L.A. Seoul Asian Grill. The new owners have given the aging dining rooms the fresh modern look of a stylized country inn.

A large new patio accommodates smokers and tabletop barbecue grills burning coconut shells and oak briquettes. The coals are heated in a room at the end of the patio and taken out to the tables. The former sushi bar will be turned into a “butcher shop” displaying the barbecue cuts, including the prime-grade ribs they’ll be offering.

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Even modest restaurants are upgrading. The always excellent barbecue Soowon Galbi simply changed from gas to premium oak charcoal. It’s a more refined cousin of the boisterous Soot Bull Jeep charcoal barbecue on 8th Street, with a deserved reputation for its panchan, or side dishes (I counted 13 plus a salad). Unlike most barbecues, Soowon provides rice cake sheets for wrapping barbecued meat with salad, taco fashion.

Many restaurants are working to improve the quality of their ingredients. Oh suggests that this is because supermarkets have made people conscious of meat grades, so restaurants are obliged to offer choice or even prime meat.

He must be right. In the middle of barbecue-intensive Olympic Boulevard, Chung Kiwa has posted a prominent sign advertising Angus beef. It has also added ostrich and wild boar--very lean and flavorful, served with Korean bean sauce.

Prime meats are the drawing card at the new Manna, a branch of a Korean chain specializing in beef shabu shabu, cooked by a waitress at your table in a charming garden setting. It also offers grilled steak and refined presentations such as the Rose peonche, a sort of seared sashimi-style beef eaten with dipping sauce and fresh herbs.

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A handful of restaurants specialize in some dish they’ve honed to perfection. Usually these are old-country foods Koreans consider too weird or too spicy for others (they may be right). When you want a real taste of Korea, these places must be on your list.

Unless you read Korean, you’d never know that the menu at Si Gol touts the healthfulness of its dishes. It lists only tabletop barbecue items in English (squid, marinated beef, chuck flap and more). But in Hangul script it explains that these come with generous platters of herbs and vegetables so you can wrap everything in lettuce tacos (a service style known as ssambap). Accompanying this is a unique seasoning paste composed of 20 ingredients, including ground wild sesame seeds, pumpkin, apricot and other nuts and seeds. The meal is fresh, light and flavorful. And you scoop your own ice cream for dessert.

Across the parking lot from Si Gol, another wonderful find, Kojubu, makes artful khal kooksoo (or khal kuksu)--chewy hand-rolled, hand-cut noodles, cooked in broth with fresh live clams. If Patina made khal kooksoo, it would taste like this. The shop serves much else, including duk bokki (traditionally spelled ttok bokki), a baroque communal hot pot of sliced rice cake, vegetables, ramen noodles, egg noodles and dumplings, all in a spicy sauce.

The menu at Seoul Garden lists favorites like spicy yukejang beef soup, ground soybean casserole and, of course, barbecue. But you see only one thing on the tabletop burners--Genghis Khan shabu shabu ceremoniously served for two or more. It’s poached beef and vegetables with an exquisite dipping sauce, followed by ruggedly thick noodles. Finally rice is mixed with some of the remaining broth, enriched with an egg and crisp nori seaweed. The $16.50 dinner experience is unbeatable.

Kang Seo Myun Oak, opened by the grandson of the founder of the Seoul restaurants of the same name, is renowned for its northwestern North Korea-style naeng myun. Many restaurants serve these cold buckwheat noodles, but few can match the chewy texture of these or the penetrating flavor of the rich beef broth in which they float. The garnish of blue radish is another special touch. Also available since November (written on the wall) is quang (or kwang) naeng myun,a dish of hot or cold noodles topped with meat and pheasant.

Ham Hung offers a quite different naeng myun from the northeast of North Korea, slightly chewy (made from potato and yam starch), served in a spicy, garlicky sauce and topped with skate wing. If you don’t like this gelatinous fish, you can get the meat-topped version.

Korean sushi rolls, known as kimbap, look Japanese, but the rice is unseasoned and the filling is combinations of cooked ingredients. At Chongro Kimbob, they’re filled with minced beef, vegetables, fresh tuna with omelet or other combinations, and they make great portable meals. The cafe also serves kimchi pancakes, spicy ramen and assorted light dishes. A colorful picture menu and translated menu in the booklet on the counter make ordering easy.

Health ranks high in the selection of Korean food, and many restaurants specialize in health-promoting dishes containing deer antler or ginseng.

Jinju Gomtang’s entire menu is six long-simmered soups acclaimed for restorative qualities. With their deep, meaty flavors, they taste as if a Korean grandma has slaved over them all day. Only heh hang gook (hangover cure soup, traditionally spelled haejangguk), with beef blood and vegetables, is spicy. The bland, defatted, unsalted broths of, say, cow bone soup with beef slices (jinju chadole beh gi, traditionally spelled Chinju chadol baegi) or oxtail soup (kori gome tang or kkori komtang) make an ideal backdrop for condiments like green onions, chile paste or fiery soy sauce. The shop is open 24 hours a day. Park and enter at the rear door.

The delicious black goat dishes for which Chin Go Gae is known are prized for their tonic attributes. People recovering from serious illnesses and postpartum mothers swear by them. Both the soup and tabletop grill versions are loaded with exotic herbs and leafy greens that cook down with the spicy meat.

Soon dae, a rich blood sausage studded with transparent noodles, is to Korea what bratwurst is to Munich. At Ham Kyung Do, soon dae is all that is served. You can get it sliced on a plate with kimchi or as a meal with rice and soup. One sausage plate comes with organ meats on the side, and there’s a soon dae soup. The shop owner speaks enough English to help you decipher the menu.

Barring a flight to Korea, few places can give you the feeling you’ve left the country better than the Secret Garden at Buffet Land. The exterior of this huge restaurant looks vaguely like a hotel. Pass through the reception area and a huge room with a vast Korean and semi-Western buffet and you come to the garden. There, as is the custom in many Korean parks, where vendors sell all sorts of anju from carts, you see men grilling on charcoal hibachi-style grills, people cutting fish or serving beer or kimchi. In one tented area, people are huddled around tabletop grills. The menu is in Korean, and it’s worth the adventure to ask for a translation.

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Restaurant Menu

The following are in Koreatown:

* BCD Tofu House, 3575 Wilshire Blvd. (213) 382-6677. 24 hours daily.

* Buffet Land, 1925 W. Olympic Blvd. (213) 380-9292. Lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; dinner from 5:30 to 10 p.m. daily.

* Chapman Market complex, 3465 6th St.: Intercrew, (213) 365-8111, 10:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily. Bosco Cake Salon, (213) 388-2277, 10 a.m. to midnight daily. Bohemian, (213) 487-6155,4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Friday, Saturday; 4 p.m. to 1 a.m Sunday to Thursday.

* Chin Go Gae, 3063 W. 8th St. (213) 480-8071. 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily.

* Chongro Kimbob, 232 N. Western Ave. (213) 386-6112. 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; closed Sundays.

* Chung Kiwa, 3545 W. Olympic Blvd. (323) 737-0809. 11:30 a.m. to midnight daily.

* Dan Sung Sa, 3317 6th St. (213) 487-9100. 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily.

* Ham Hung Restaurant, 809 S. Ardmore Ave. (213) 381-1520. 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.

* Ham Kyung Do Restaurant, 955 S. Vermont Ave. (213) 388-2013. 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.

* Jinju Gomtang, 610 S. Western Ave. (213) 383-6789. 24 hours daily.

* Kang Seo Myun Oak, 3033 W. 6th St. (213) 382-1717. 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.

* Kojubu Noodles, 474 N. Western Ave. (323) 467-2900. 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.

* L.A. Seoul Asian Grill, 100 S. Western Ave. (213) 388-1975. 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.

* Manna Korean Restaurant, 3377 W. Olympic Blvd. (323) 733-8516. 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.

* Morangak, 3377 Wilshire Blvd., No. 100. (213) 381-8244. 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.

* Seoul Garden, 1833 W. Olympic Blvd. (213) 386-8477. 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; closed Sundays.

* Si Gol, 487 N. Western Ave. (323) 467-0100. Lunch from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; dinner from 3 to 10 p.m. daily.

* Soowon Galbi, 856 S. Vermont Ave. (213) 365-9292. 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.

* Wilshire B.B.Q. House, 3986 Wilshire Blvd. (213) 384-7470. 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily.

* Yongsusan, 950 Vermont Ave. (213) 388-3042. Lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; dinner from 5 to 10:30 p.m. daily.