Into the Melding Pot

Apart from the recent avalanche of Japanese shabu shabu places opening around town, dozens of other restaurants do a thriving business with their own version of tabletop-cooked hot pots. Seoul Garden, near downtown, has a large menu, but almost everyone ignores it and gets the Korean-style Genghis Khan hot pot (served for two or more). Shabu lovers know the routine, but will find that cooking the micron-thin beef slices with the mix of shredded cabbage and scallions from the vegetable plate produces a distinctive taste. When the beef and vegetables are consumed, the waitress tosses a huge mound of chewy handmade udon into the pot. By now, the cooking water has turned to a broth for the noodles. For the final course, the server mixes up a sort of rice stew in the remaining broth — enriching it with a whole egg and crispy nori. The $14.50 lunch or $16.50 dinner experience is unbeatable.

The second floor of Koreatown’s Dae Sung Oak (the first-floor menu lists mostly soups and noodles) serves several different beef-based hot pots. But it’s the seafood shabu shabu that’s the standout. In this case, you don’t actually swish-swish to cook. The generous mound of ingredients, including clams, octopus, oysters, fish cake, tofu and shiitake mushrooms, are steamed at the table in a wooden box. As with shabu, you season each steamed bite in a lemony soy-sauce dip. Unless you have the appetite of a sumo wrestler, it’s hard to eat your way through everything served. But save some room, because the best part is the spicy rice-and-kimchee soup made from the steaming juices.

Location Info

Map

Chili My Soul

4928 Balboa Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 91436

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: San Fernando Valley

0 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

Dae Sung Oak

2585 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90006

Category: Restaurant > Barbecue

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

Deerfield Garden

130 S. Atlantic Blvd.
Monterey Park, CA 91754-2727

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: Monterey Park/ Alhambra/ S. Gabriel

Har Lam Kee Restaurant

150 E. Garvey Ave.
Monterey Park, CA 91755-2906

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: Monterey Park/ Alhambra/ S. Gabriel

Hop Woo

845 N. Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Category: Restaurant > Chinese

Region: Chinatown/ Elysian Park

Photos

Jeon Ju Restaurant

2716 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90006

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

Kingston Cafe

333 S. Fair Oaks Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91105-2541

Category: Restaurant > Caribbean

Region: Pasadena and vicinity

Koutoubia

2116 Westwood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90025

Category: Restaurant > Moroccan

Region: West L.A.

Photos

Mimosa

8009 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90048-4503

Category: Restaurant > Bistro

Region: Melrose/ Beverly/ Fairfax

Related Content

• Pollo a la Brasa: 99 Essential Restaurants 2013
  February 28, 2013
• A Dim Sum Crawl in Chinatown
  April 15, 2013
• Din Tai Fung: 99 Essential Restaurants 2013
  February 28, 2013
• Shanghai No. 1 Seafood Village: 99 Essential Restaurants 2013
  February 28, 2013
• 5 Essential Chinese Restaurants in Los Angeles
  March 7, 2013

More About

• Victoria Garden
• Hop Woo
• Koreatown
• Eating Out
• Foods

Tsukuba in Torrance, a favorite spot with the expat Japanese community, offers four different nabe (one-pot) dishes for two or more. Its udon suki, an elegant platter of very fresh seafoods, veggies and disappointingly lackluster udon that you cook in dashi, is absolutely classic, yet I found it a little too plain for my taste.

All over the city are found one-pot dishes that new residents have brought here from their homelands. The food represents a link to their pasts, to fond memories and simpler lifestyles. Here, they needn’t rely on preserved ingredients, or on hot pots to keep them warm, and stretching the protein isn’t usually an issue. The following are among the best I’ve encountered.

Fiery-spiced dishes may come to mind whenever Latin American food is mentioned, but most of the region’s long-simmered one-pots are as mellow-tasting as Mrs. Goldberg’s chicken soup. In fact, the sancocho de gallina at the new Restaurante Café Colombiain Burbank could have come from her stove. The dish’s name derives from sancochar, the Spanish term for parboil, and refers to many pot au feu–style dishes served in a little broth. Café Colombia also makes an oxtail sancocho. Both these dishes are copious feasts of the meats cooked together with green plantain, yucca and potato. Rice is added later. An arepa, the flat Colombian corn cake, comes alongside.

An even more baroque pot au feu, from the Guatemalan restaurant Victoria Garden, is de kak-ik, a native Indian name for a pot of turkey drumsticks and rice simmered in turkey broth, served as a sort of reverse soup. Each single order seems enough to satisfy a family of four, plus the dog. It consists of a whole drumstick and a mound of rice from the pot, served on a plate along with an avocado slice and tortillas flecked with fresh herbs. A big bowl of the broth is served alongside. Diners squeeze lemon and add powdered chile to spice the broth as they like it.

Night crawlers should know about the hot-pot rice dishes at Hop Woo in Chinatown. These warming concoctions of rice, soup stock and meats cook together in a clay pot for about 30 minutes until the flavors permeate the rice and a crisp bottom layer forms. There are six hot-pot rice styles, including pork ribs with black-bean sauce, chicken and black mushrooms, and preserved pork and sausage. Since their preparation is too time-consuming a task for the line cooks during lunch and dinner rush hours, Hop Woo serves these hot pots only between 9:30 p.m. and 2 a.m. Although somewhat bothersome to cook, the dishes have a devoted following, and so remain on the menu. Hop Woo does hot pots without rice, too, including one with chunks of roasted pork, fried oysters and fried tofu in brown sauce, and the ever-popular duck’s web with black mushrooms.

It’s safe to say that you could find hundreds more Chinese one-pot meals in and around L.A., but my latest quality finds include the one-pot dishes at Deer Garden, a Szechuan restaurant, and Mini Shanghai, where the assorted casserole soup is a filling, delicate-tasting meal in a sand pot. A pretty arrangement of chicken pieces, shrimp, pork, omelet, salt-fish strips and other items sits atop a bed of vegetables mixed with clear noodles. Deer Garden’s several hot pots (called here “warm pots”) are, flavorwise, at the opposite end of the spectrum. The sharp tart and garlicky northern Chinese beef hot pot with preserved cabbage and long-cooked beef, a dish found in several Islamic restaurants, is the most meticulously cooked version I’ve tried. There’s also a lamb version, a meatball-and-vegetable warm pot, and one with pork and pickled cabbage.