Koreatown's Top 40

So Kong Dong’s signature tofu casserole, soontofu, is a marvelous thing, bubbling and sputtering in its red-hot bowl, robustly flavored with shrimp and clams and oysters and beef, walloped with chile and garlic. Beverly’s soontofu is a little tamer, the broth more briny than complex, like an austere French bouillon as compared to a concentrated California-style stock fortified with tomato paste and fistfuls of herbs. So Kong Dong would seem to win on points. Yet the tofu itself, freshly made every day at both restaurants, is smooth and supple at Beverly, barely gelled blocks of pure, subtle flavor that melt into an elusive milkiness in your mouth, where at So Kong Dong the tofu tends to be kind of . . . curdy. You’ll still find me at Beverly. But I wouldn’t blame you if you ended up across the street with Caryl instead. So Kong Dong, 2716 W. Olympic Blvd., No. 104, (213) 380-3737; Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant, 2717 W. Olympic Blvd., No. 108 (213) 380-1113.

ZONE DIET

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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

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Mandarin House

3074 W. Eighth St.
Los Angeles, CA 90005

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

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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

More than a dozen years after its opening, the Safety Zone Café is still a Smithsonian-quality masterpiece of bad 1970s restaurant design, down to the distressed bronze-look plastic, and the frothy colored drinks that look alarmingly like Brandy Alexanders . . . all that’s missing is an engraved Oly mirror or two. A hidden club within the restaurant supposedly borrows its motifs from the lower-school Korean classroom. A tent in the back, the hip place to be, is home to fair-to-middling codfish stew, very decent dumpling soup, and okay bulgogi. A dozen years later, the specialty is probably steak and potatoes, done more in the style of a Midwestern roadhouse than a charcoal pit in Seoul. But you’ve got to give the Safety Zone some props: In Paxton, Nebraska, there is just no way you’re going to be able to order a platter of sautéed octopus on the side. 3630 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 387-7595.

SOUP IS GOO FOOD

In Seoul, there is reputedly a Hangover Alley, a narrow downtown street lined on both sides with restaurants dedicated to the art of the curative tonics known collectively as gomtang. In Koreatown, there is Jinju Gomtang, a 24-hour café devoted to pale bone broths garnished with oxtail or sliced brisket, as bland as oatmeal and twice as soothing. But the real specialty of the place, a soup you might consider having for lunch even if you weren’t on the wrong side of a bottle of dong dong ju, is the spicy haejanguk, a pottage of cabbage, chiles, scallions, garlic in a funky-fresh cow-part broth, garnished with little clots of blood and ready to come alive with the addition of a little sea salt and a lot of the restaurant’s house-made chile paste. 610 S. Western Ave., (213) 383-6789.

THE CHOSUN PEOPLE

For decades, Woo Lae Oak on Western was the favorite Korean restaurant of people who didn’t like Korean food all that much, a fancy place where they could convince themselves that galbi wasn’t all that different from an ordinary steak dinner. (Mostly because it wasn’t: The restaurant’s pallid galbi very much resembled the London broil at any number of steak houses.) Now that the Koreatown Woo Lae Oak is on hiatus for a year or so, the conservative Koreatown choice is probably Chosun Galbi, which has the patio-side glamour of a Beverly Hills garden party, granite tables, gorgeous waitresses, and expensive, well-marbled meat that glows as pinkly as a Tintoretto cherub. Make sure to throw some shrimp on the barbie, too — the pricey little beasties crisp up like a dream. 3330 W. Olympic Blvd., (323) 734-3330.

PRINCE CHARMING

Imagine a Korean pub shoehorned into the fanciest restaurant in Los Angeles circa 1953, complete with the lawn jockeys at the top of the stairs and oil paintings of earls above the oxblood leather banquettes. The food, you understand, is not exactly the point at the Prince, which seems to specialize in sugary stir-fries and American dishes that might have been inspired by Quad Cities Rotary banquet menus. The basic unit of currency here is the kimchi pancake, a thin mass of egg batter laced with fermented cabbage, lashed together with scallions, then fried to an exquisite, oily crispness. Kimchi pancakes come free with your drinks, which makes sense, because the greasy heat of the things is enough to power you through an entire double-size bottle of Korean Hite beer. 3198 1/2 W. Seventh St., (213) 389-2007.

DEM BONES

Han Bat, hidden on a side street of the Western Avenue drag, is a shrine to the cult of Korean beef soup, sullongtang, to the extent that there is barely no other food served, no other food needed. Good sullongtang, which is completely without fat, is an incandescent, glowing white, the result of long, patient cooking and the essence of many bones. Before it was largely supplanted by Vietnamese pho in Koreatown, sullongtang, which also carries a payload of thin noodles, sliced brisket, and various organs if you want it that way, was as locally popular as ramen is in Little Tokyo. The soup is unsalted: You season it to taste with a half-teaspoon or so of coarse salt from a container on the table. You also add loads of freshly chopped scallion greens, which soften quickly in the hot broth, and possibly a spoonful of the chile paste, which tints the soup flamingo pink. Flamingo pink: the color of victory. 4163 W. Fifth St., (213) 383-9499.