Koreatown's Top 40

And for the first time since the golden age of Gorky’s, Ship’s and the Atomic Cafe, I’m finding places to go at 3 in the morning, scenes to fall into, the sort of tumult that makes you feel as if you are living in a great international city instead of a sleepy Midwestern town.

FIRE, WALK WITH ME

Location Info

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Zip Fusion Restaurant

3855 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90010-3202

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

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Soot Bull Jeep

3136 W. 8th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90005

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

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Shik Do Rak

2501 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90006

Category: Restaurant > American

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

Dan Sung Sa

3317 W. Sixth St.
Los Angeles, CA 90020

Category: Restaurant > Korean

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

Photos

Mandarin House

3074 W. Eighth St.
Los Angeles, CA 90005

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

Photos

Chung Moo Kim Bop House

3030 W. Olympic Blvd., #108
Los Angeles, CA 90006

Category: Restaurant >

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

So Kong Dong

2716 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90006

Category: Restaurant > Korean

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

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• Kong Dong
• Koreatown
• Seoul
• Sedans
• Main Dish Recipes

As you perambulate the streets of late-night Koreatown, you will hear a great deal about something the locals call “fusion” cuisine, which I had always assumed was the Korean version of the sort of East-West crossover cooking popularized by Wolfgang Puck at Chinois and by Suzanne Tracht at the late Jozu. There are undoubtedly wonderful dishes to be invented by introducing fermented bean paste, balloon flower stems and crisp Korean pears into classical French cookery, or even by making a Korean chigae with ingredients like foie gras and quince instead of tofu and pickled turnips. I once had angel hair pasta in a kimchi cream sauce at a now-defunct café on La Brea and thought it could be the start of something big.

But as it is practiced in Koreatown, fusion cuisine is more or less a Korean analogue to the cooking at the Hong Kong–style cafés in Monterey Park, which is to say a menu of the more basic kinds of Korean snack food, sushi perhaps, and American coffee shop food adjusted to the Korean-American palate, and usually served in nightclub-like surroundings. It is a safe bet that nobody ever braved the pounding Korean pop at Intercrew, the Skybar-level snootiness at Bliss, or the neon glare at Palm Tree for the food alone.

Still, there is something about sitting outside by the roaring fire pit at Zip, which is one of the grander examples of the breed, admiring the parade of tight dresses, glancing at the film clips that flash across a sort of architectural fin above the roofline, and nibbling on perfect fried calamari, giant slabs of grilled freshwater eel and California rolls that are only slightly less formidable than softball bats. The real surprise was the ghastly sounding kimchi pancake with cheese — a crisp, tangy, mozzarella-glazed Korean simulacrum of pizza that was in no way inferior to a decent pizza itself. 3855 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 365-6677.

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR THIGHS

A waitress scatters a trowelful of glowing hardwood coals into a pit set in the middle of your table. Above the charcoal goes a greased wire screen; around the pit go a dozen or so dishes of pickled cabbage, candied fish, and the rest of the little appetizers and condiments that come with a Korean barbecue meal.

If you are new to this sort of thing, a waitress will unceremoniously dump raw, marinated short ribs, pork loin, baby octopus onto the grill in front of you, returning periodically to turn the meat when it is sizzled crisp, scissoring it into bite-size chunks, maneuvering it so that your ignorance of cooking times injures the meat no more than absolutely necessary. When a bit of meat is cooked to your liking, wrap it in a scrap of lettuce leaf with perhaps a few shreds of marinated scallion and a schmear of pungent fermented-bean paste. Then repeat.

Soot Bull Jeep is the first Koreatown barbecue restaurant that locals will tell you about, and probably the first they’ll warn you against too. Because while it is noisy and smoky, afloat on the vodka-like Korean rice wine soju, with all the bustle you’d expect in the heart of a great city, the same fragrant fumes that give so much flavor to the meat will have done the same to your pants. Dress accordingly. 3136 W. Eighth St., (213) 387-3865.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH DDUK

The current fad in Korean barbecue restaurants is the style of service called dduk bo sam, which means that along with your heaps of raw short ribs and piles of foliage, you are issued stacks of oiled rice noodles, about the size and shape of beer coasters, with which you can wrap grilled meat into plump little tacos with slivered scallions, raw garlic, chile paste, or a bit of the leftover kimchi from the next table. Shik Do Rak pioneered dduk bo rak in Koreatown, and at dinnertime its tables are filled with diners industriously constructing fancy noodle wraps that would probably be a big hit on Chinese dim sum carts. The main dining room is decorated, incongruously enough, with gnomes, faux trellises and vast photomurals of what look like the flower gardens outside West Virginia’s patrician Greenbrier Hotel. Because after all, nothing stimulates the appetite like grainy pictures of rhododendrons. 2501 W. Olympic Blvd., (213) 384-4148.

THE NECK BONE’S CONNECTED TO THE ...

It’s amazing, it really is, the sheer number of Koreatown restaurants devoted to one hangover remedy or another, until you consider the torrents of makkoli and Crown Royal that course through the streets every night. Also, Korean hangover remedies happen to taste really good. Among the best and most restorative of these, as unfortunately we have reason to know, is gamjatang, a sort of thick soup made with potatoes, chile and meaty pork neck bones. Hamjipark, a sticky-table dive down on Pico, does a rather spectacular version of this soup, simmered until the meat has turned almost to jelly and thickened with a brick-red purée of chiles — if you weren’t nursing a hair-of-the-dog shot of soju, you might almost mistake it for a Oaxacan mole colorado. The barbecued pork ribs are not sad to eat either. Hamjipark has a gentrified branch up near the Chapman Market, with the ambiance of an outer-arrondissement sidewalk café, but on Sunday morning, when the roof of your mouth is a killing floor, the grungier Pico restaurant is where you want to be. 4135 W. Pico Blvd., (323) 733-3635; also 3407 W. Sixth St., (213) 365-8773.