Can’t get to Pyeongchang? Los Angeles may not have snow, but we have Koreatown, a vibrant neighborhood of incredible restaurants, bars, markets, spas, bookstores and more. Exploring it is a sport all its own.

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If you have been watching the Pyeongchang Olympics, hoping to catch a glimpse of the area’s famous buckwheat noodles, or wish that the coverage reached to the local trout farms as well as the biathlon and the luge, you aren’t alone. Korea is one of the most fascinating food countries in the world, with regional dishes that seem to change from block to block, a mind-wrenching array of fermentations, and spicy foods hardwired to jolt the pleasure center of your brain.

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Los Angeles, of course, is lucky enough to have the largest Korean community outside the motherland and a concentration of restaurants that pick up trends sometimes just months after they have hit Seoul. Koreatown isn’t just a Korean neighborhood — with its markets, nightclubs, towers, billiard parlors and food-obsessive mini-malls, it sometimes seems as if it is a distant prefecture of Seoul that just happens to be extra-rich in Salvadorans and Oaxacans; a place that honors not just the emigrés who started arriving in California in the late 1970s but also their children — Chloe Kim! — who have invented a brand new way to be American.

Fresh sea urchin, bibimbap-style at A-Won. (Steph Cha) A-Won Sometimes I think A-Won should be better-regarded for its seafood tangs — boiling, frothing, chile-smacked soups served in red-hot communal pots. Al tang, thick with mushrooms, herbs and chewy sacs of cod roe, is especially good. But it is hard to get out of there without ordering al bap, a hearty Korean equivalent of Japanese chirashi: a bowl of seasoned rice striped with different kinds of roe, a bit of omelet, and even a bit of barbecued eel. The Korean sashimi isn’t bad, either — it’s bigger than the Japanese kind, and you can dose it with bean paste and raw garlic if you want. But the restaurant’s famous specialty is hwe dup bap, slivers of raw fish that you toss at the table with greens, vegetables, pickles and hot rice, tinting it as red as you dare with chile paste that you squirt out of a repurposed ketchup bottle.

Beverly Soon Tofu If you asked a CGI guy to reinvent tofu, it would probably look a lot like soondubu, a heaving mass that spits like a lake of volcanic lava and broadcasts a fine, gory mist of chile and broth. The soondubu cult has spread pretty far in the Los Angeles area, and if you look hard enough you can probably find a cauldron of the seething bean curd within a few minutes of your home. But the local soondubu masters have been preparing the dish at Beverly Soon Tofu for something like 32 years, and the barely gelled blocks of pure, subtle tofu, which you can order spicy or nonspicy, are still unsurpassed. I like the version with clams.

Bon Juk Koreatown has rarely been noted for its serenity, but on the right afternoon, when you’re slumped into the kind of low padded chairs that resemble artifacts from a bank lobby circa 1983, Bon Juk, the local outlet of a popular Seoul-based porridge specialist, can seem soothingly bland. The walls are dominated by huge photographs of the various kinds of porridge on offer, along with descriptions of their nutritive virtues — the porridge with smoked salmon comes off almost as a Korean version of a Scottish kedgeree, and the deluxe jeonbokjuk is spiked with an impressive quantity of chewy abalone shards. The pumpkin porridge with glutinous rice dumplings is sweet, gentle and utterly calming. Are you going to get the spicy porridge with octopus and kimchi instead? I don’t blame you.

Buil Sangye Tang It is not difficult to find samgyetang in Koreatown restaurants. The brothy, whole game hen, stuffed with sticky rice, jujubes and gnarled fingers of fresh ginseng, is one of the most restorative dishes in a culture dedicated to restorative cuisine — it’s like delicatessen chicken soup times 10. But the best samgyetang in Koreatown is probably at this cramped mini-mall specialist. When you sprinkle a bit of gray sea salt into the bland soup, the flavors bloom as if by magic: pockets of pureed garlic infusing the rice, plumes of sweetness trickling from the dried fruit, and a lovely chickeny aroma erupting from the bird’s soft flesh. For an extra couple of bucks, you can substitute shaved deer antler for the ginseng, but I’ve never felt the need.

Chunju Han-il Kwan Budae jjigae can seem a bit like an urban legend when you first hear about it, a spicy Korean soup thick with hot dogs, Spam and packaged ramen noodles, ingredients originally cadged from American military bases around Seoul. It is sometimes called military stew, sometimes Johnson tang, in honor of President Johnson. I should probably emphasize that Chunju Han-il Kwan is a nice place, with an elegant array of banchan, small plates, served before the meal, a large repertory of traditional soups and stews, tons of seafood and crisp, lacy potato pancakes. It serves proper Korean food. But what draws the crowds on weekends is undoubtedly the level-10 budae jjigae, kimchi, rice cakes and fresh chrysanthemum leaves crowding the processed meats — and what you eat is both delicious and unmistakably Korean, another example of the culture’s genius at finding the beauty in unpromising ingredients.

Dan Sung Sa If you spend a lot of time watching old Asian movies, Dan Sung Sa may be the kind of place you thought had disappeared half a century ago — dim, wooden and loud, lined with walled, graffiti-splattered booths, centered on cooks who crouch over guttering flames. It wasn’t until the owners built a website that most non-Koreans learned that the restaurant was an interpretation of a pojangmacha, the orange-tented street pubs quickly disappearing from Seoul, designed to resemble an old Korean movie theater. You hadn’t needed a menu to realize that the restaurant was built around the cheerful consumption of soju; grilled skewers holding meat, seafood or the seaweed-laminated dough-vermicelli constructions everyone called “dumbbells”; and bar food like sauteed octopus, kimchi pancakes and barbecued pork ribs. The cabbage soup, which comes with your first drink, is served in a metal bowl so battered you might wonder whether somebody worked it over with a baseball bat.

Kobe-style roast gui special from Dong Il Jang. (Mariah Tauger / For The Times) Dong Il Jang Dong Il Jang is pretty old-school even for Koreatown, a vestige of the time before the scene was dominated by barbecue restaurants — the dark interior may remind you of old steakhouses like Taylor’s. And while there is plenty of barbecue to go around here, almost everybody orders the roast gui instead — beautiful sliced rib-eye seared in butter on a huge tabletop pan. Snatch a piece from the hot iron before the juices cook out, season it with a bit of sesame oil and salt, and chase it with an icy shot of soju: perfect. Dong Il Jang’s version of the Korean steak tartare called yuk hwe, slivered raw beef tossed with sesame oil and slivers of Asian pear, is often considered the best in K-town.

Eight Korean BBQ Has Eight stopped advertising grilled pork belly as health food? If so, I don’t really want to know. Because it always put a little jump in my step, imagining that the set menu of eight seasoned pork belly slabs was toning my body in eight different ways, the ginseng pork belly toning metabolism before the garlic pork belly got around to the cholesterol, the curry-flavored pork belly preventing Alzheimer’s before the bright-green herbed pork belly went to work easing depression. It’s like statins, beta-blockers and Prozac all in one, administered in the form of tabletop-grilled pork belly. Could you ask for more persuasive evidence of a loving God?

Eighth Street Soondae Soondae, blood sausage, is one of the most popular Korean dishes in Los Angeles as well as in Seoul — thin casings stuffed with oxblood and transparent threads of rice vermicelli, then boiled in an organ-rich soup, fried crisp or sauteed with vegetables and heaps of spicy bean paste. It’s oddly genteel stuff, soondae, neither as funky nor as goopy as you might fear. And at the lovely Eighth Street Soondae, one of the oldest of Koreatown’s many soondae parlors, it is the stuff of shirtsleeve business lunches. The house combination plate includes crunchy fried soondae, sliced pig’s ear and a heap of boiled pork intestines, evoking the Korean equivalent of a Lyonnaise bouchon.

Bulgogi at Gwang Yang. (Mariah Tauger / For The Times) Gwang Yang The only American branch of a small Seoul-based chain uses only prime beef. It charges prices not much less than what you might expect to pay in a splashy American steakhouse. And it is devoted to the cult of bulgogi, which has a reputation as the poor relation of Korean barbecue world, the one dish nobody is happy to see on the table at a cheap all-you-can-eat KBBQ joint. Yet the crisp kimchi pancakes are served on an arrangement of fresh ggaenip leaves, the pungent herb at the heart of Korean cuisine. The yuk hwe is luxuriant and soft. The barbecued skirt steak, rib steak and the kkot sal, richly marbled “flower beef,” are tasty. And the Gangnam-style bulgogi is splendid: big, garlicky sheets of beef that crumple and soften on the tabletop grill, scented with smoke, sesame and pear, dissolving like ice cream on your tongue.

Ham Hung Is Ham Hung a North Korean restaurant? Sort of, I guess, in that it’s named after North Korea’s second largest city. And its best dish is also of North Korean origin — bibim naengmyeon, chewy cold buckwheat noodles tossed with spicy gochujang, slivered vegetables and extra-chewy bits of raw skate, whose slightly weird taste is just right. In its former location, Ham Hung was one of the grand restaurants of Koreatown. In its current strip mall location, it’s a noodle shop with attitude. You wouldn’t be wrong if you decided to get a plate of sweet grilled short ribs on the side.

Ham Ji Park Some people think that Ham Ji Park's spicy gamjatang, brick-red pork neck and potato soup, may be the single-best hangover cure in an area dense in hangover cures. The chowder-thick brew certainly feels soothing. There are a lot of other gamjatang specialists in Koreatown, but the density, the soft meat and the piney snap of the version at the original Pico Boulevard Ham Ji Park always strikes me as the most pleasant — ranking even a tick or so above the soup at the restaurant's 6th Street branch. The restaurant’s other great dish is pork ribs — beautifully caramelized and not too sweet, a massive pile to be snipped into edible mouthfuls at the table with a pair of scissors. An order of each, supplemented with beer and soju, is more than enough food for four or five.

Han Bat Sullungtang is a peculiar specialty for a restaurant, basically beef bones boiled for days until the liquid turns pearly gray and the aroma is more of minerals than meat. It’s bone broth in its most intense form, yet as soothing as a glass of milk. It may take on presence only after you stir in green onion tops and a smidge more salt than you may think it needs. A lot of places in Los Angeles do sullungtang. At Han Bat, it is the only thing on the menu, ready to be supplemented with flank, brisket or a variety pack of cattle organs. Some people consider it vulgar to flavor the soup with the house chile paste, but we promise not to tell.

Pork belly with cabbage leaves and kimchi from Hangari Bajirak Kalguksu. (Mariah Tauger / For The Times) Hangari Bajirak Kalgooksoo The longest lines in the restaurant strip mall on 6th at Alexandria are for Dan Sung Sa — its spicy galbijjim is a pure adrenaline rush. But the second longest are for the thick, hand-cut noodles at Hangari. At noon and in the early evening, the waits for both places are about the same, which can lead to 45 minutes of pure FOMO, flitting back and forth between the sign-in sheets, unwilling to commit to one pleasure or another. And then your name is called at Hangari, and you settle into an enormous bowl of those noodles in anchovy-scented broth, lavishly paved with tiny manila clams, spiked with well-aged kimchi (if you’ve asked for it), a long-simmered umami bomb. I’m still not sure why a tiny bowl of dressed, cooked barley is brought out before the noodles — an extra dose of starch? — but the chewy grains are nutty and delicious.

Hwa Sun Ji The sedate tearoom may be the only calm bit of real estate in Koreatown on a busy afternoon, a place to sit at low tables, listen to traditional Korean music and linger over an aged green tea. The menu of sweets is limited but includes Koreatown’s definitive pat bing su, a restrained dessert of shaved ice and sweet beans that somehow evolved elsewhere into monstrous concoctions containing canned fruit cocktail, whipped cream and showers of Fruity Pebbles. Hwa Sun Ji’s idea of crazy fun is su jung hwa, a cold, sweet punch flavored with cinnamon and dried persimmon, garnished with a single pine nut.

Jae Bu Do Dinner at a shellfish grill is one of the most enduring rituals in Koreatown. A waitress scatters clams on a wire grill; you pluck them the moment they pop open. Tiny scallops on the half-shell seethe in butter. Surf clam shells sizzle. Huge oysters steam in their shells. Prawns blacken. Snails simmer in vessels fashioned from aluminum foil. Sweet potatoes roast in the embers. You dip everything in gochujang, melted butter or both. If you pay a little extra, hagfish, an ancient precursor to the eel, will be set to writhing on the grill too. It’s as easy as specifying an A, B or C dinner. Jae Bu Do is open until 2 a.m., which can be handy if you’re looking for somewhere to have supper after a show.

Bibimbap at Jeon Ju. (Kevin P. Casey / Los Angeles Times) Jeon Ju When you visit the city of Jeonju, you will probably notice that many of the streets are lined with restaurants serving tossed rice salad, the region’s great gift to cuisine. So it is no surprise that the Koreatown restaurant Jeon Ju serves practically nothing but bibimbap — a minimalist concoction of rice, mountain vegetables, an egg and oddly delicious bean sprouts (plus meat if you want it) tossed with a big spoonful of the fermented chile-bean paste gochujang. Jeon Ju’s bibimbap is as deep and complex as a dram of old Scotch. Try the dolsot version made in a superheated stone vessel. There will be a subtly smoky flavor and a delicious, crunchy crust, like Korean tahdig, to nibble on toward the end of the meal.

Jun Won The old Jun Won felt a little like a private club, a secret, hidden dining room with some of L.A.’s best home-style cooking. In its new location, tucked next to a Uygher barbecue in a crowded strip mall, it is merely obscure, although that doesn’t seem to stop the crowds piling in at dinnertime for the pan-fried mackerel, marinated raw crab or spicy sauteed octopus, served with some of the most varied and freshest banchan in town. The bossam, a platter of sliced boiled pork belly served with fermented tiny fish and leaves and pickles to wrap it in, is perhaps a bit less elaborate than what you find at Kobawoo or Jang Teo, but is worth trying anyway — get it with fresh oysters to tuck in with the pork. And it would be a crime to visit without an order of chefly black cod steamed with thick slices of radish, which is one of the best dishes in Koreatown.

Prime boneless short rib at Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong There are those who might dismiss Baekjeong as a chain restaurant owned by a celebrity. And they are right, at least inasmuch as the place is owned by a Korean wrestler-turned-reality show star, a life-size cutout wobbles outside the front door, and it is hard to avoid the idea that it is expanding too rapidly. (I’m not crazy about the branches in Temple City or Buena Park.) But even given the two-hour wait for a table on weekends, Baekjeong is still one of the better Korean barbecue places in Koreatown: set menus of short ribs and bulgogi and beef tongue and pork belly are nicely seared off on big tabletop charcoal grills. The grills are surrounded by built-in wells in which scrambled eggs and corn cheese will cook in the course of your meal. And you should also probably get an order of shaken dosirak, a Korean lunchbox that you whang around until the contents rearrange into a crude bibimbap. It may be the only standard restaurant dish anywhere in the world whose origin points to a bored 6-year-old on a playground.

Bossam, boiled pork belly wrapped in leaves, at Kobawoo House. (Cathy Chaplin / GastronomyBlog.com) Kobawoo House When I first started going to Kobawoo House back in the first Bush administration, I assumed that the house specialty was Korean pancakes: seafood pancakes ballasted with scallions, fluffy potato pancakes and lovely, crisp mung bean pancakes, bindaeduk, studded with bright pink bits of pork. Later, I decided it was the place to go for samgyetang, a whole, ginseng-stuffed game hen served in a pot with some of the city’s best chicken soup. It took a while, but I finally figured out what everybody was waiting in line for was the bossam, sliced pork belly that you wrap into cabbage leaf tacos with turnip kimchi, sliced chiles, fermented tiny fish — and cloves of raw garlic, if that’s the way you roll. You are going to want soju with that, a bottle of cold beer, and maybe a nap in the Uber on the way home.

Honey wings from KyoChon. (Kathy M.Y. Pyon / Los Angeles Times) KyoChon The Korean fried chicken wars have come and gone. The next strip mall opening is much more likely to involve science-y desserts or beef soup than it is yet another alt-KFC. And the brine-steam-fry recipe in David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook turns out to be pretty easy to make. But while the heat may have come down a bit on KyoChon since it was the white-hot center of the fried chicken universe, the shattering, thin-skinned snap of its basic, garlic-saturated bird is still worth keeping in mind. And it comes with all the marinated turnip cubes you can eat.

Rice cake with dumpling soup at Ma Dang Gook Soo. (Mariah Tauger / For The Times) Ma Dang Gook Soo Gook soo, the thickish hand-cut tagliatelle at the heart of the Korean noodle kitchen, may be the ultimate Korean comfort food, served in a stock based on dried anchovies, and topped with kimchi, seaweed or meat. Ma Dang Gook Soo is probably the classic Koreatown noodle shop, and it is hard to imagine a summer without its kong gook soo, those same noodles in cold soy milk flavored with a few drops of sesame.

MaPo Dak Galbi To go out for dak galbi is to submit to its ritual, to spend 90 minutes floating through the cosmos on dak galbi time. You sit around a table with a pit in its center and a ventilation duct humming overhead. You will be asked what to eat, but the question is a formality — you will be eating chicken from a communal iron pan. The waiter dumps a big bowl of marinated chicken onto the iron pan, then rice noodles, then sweet potatoes, then chopped cabbage. Just at the point when you wonder whether it is all going to burn, somebody comes by to stir in what looks like an armload of pungent ggaenip leaves and you pounce onto the sweet-hot mountain of chicken. When the food is mostly eaten and the chile sauce boils down to a thick, glossy puddle, the remnants are transformed into another mountain of fried rice. The crunchy, half-burnt bits at the bottom are widely considered the best part. And they are.

Masan Masan, another Koreatown landmark as far back as anyone can remember, is famous for its monkfish stew, the specialty of the southern city from which the restaurant takes its name. And that stew, agujjim, is pretty spectacular, stuffed with bean sprouts, briny sea squirts and as much chile as you can stand, transforming into what may remind you of seagoing pork. Masan also does a lively trade in the ephemera of the Korean live-seafood restaurant, including uni, halibut sashimi and san-nakji, the infamous octopus dish in which the tentacles of the recently dispatched cephalopod are still writhing on the plate. You may recognize the dish from the suffocation-by-octopus subplots not uncommon in Korean dramas.

Ginseng chicken soup from Mountain. (Mariah Tauger / For The Times) Mountain When things begin to go south in the mean hours after last call, Mountain is one of the first places Koreatown regulars will drag you, a gleaming yet morose 24-hour café recently relocated to the mall that holds Sun Nong Dan and Hangari. There is a permanent, if appropriate funk of kimchi and boiled animal — the short menu is more or less limited to soups: a decent samgyetang; the mandoo gook studded with dumplings and rice cakes; and a decent kimchi jjigae. As at many soup restaurants, the banchan include jangjorim, cold simmered beef with sliced chiles. And in the morning, almost everybody in the restaurant is eating jeonbokjuk, abalone porridge, decorated with a raw egg yolk that shines from the oblong bowl like the sun of a new day. I once hinted that the dose of actual abalone in the porridge was homeopathic — and while the description was not inaccurate, it has never stopped me from ordering the dish

Steamed dumplings with pork and shrimp from Myung In Dumplings. (Mariah Tauger / For The Times) Myung In Dumplings I have never quite gotten over the short life of Chungsil Hongsil, a shop owned by the relatives of a K-pop idol that served what were by far the best Korean dumplings in town. But the dumplings at Myung In, in the requisite cramped mini-mall storefront, are really pretty good, especially the wang mandoo — snowy-white buns blown up to the size of small grapefruit, stuffed with loosely packed fistfuls of ground meat and aromatics. They’re slightly refined versions of the mandoo you might pick up near a subway station in Seoul, and slightly irresistible in spite of their size.

Chicken wings at OB Bear. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times ) OB Bear The last time I dropped into OB Bear, a loud, ramshackle pub across the street from the campus of Southwestern Law School, my wife decided not to get the chicken wings. And while there is nothing wrong with the sauteed octopus, fried tteokbokki noodles or ggaenip pancakes at the tavern, those spicy, salty blazing-red fried wings have ruined more shirts than any other in Koreatown, and are the perfect accompaniment to way too much beer. Did the whole fried game hen make up for the lack of wings? For the sake of my marriage, I will admit it: yes. That greasy, juicy game hen, about 90% crunch, is awfully good.

Olympic Cheonggukjang Cheonggukjang is more or less the Korean equivalent of Japanese natto, or Taiwanese smelly tofu, a deeply fermented soy product enjoyed mostly by people who have been eating it since birth. The waiters here may warn you off the soup made from it if you are not Korean. It is deep culture. Yet there it is, roiling in a superheated bowl, the occasional mephitic bubble breaking the surface; slippery whole beans bobbing alongside herbs and cubes of tofu; crimson, smoking and alive. After a few bites, the soup takes over your body like an animist spirit. It is good to be alive.

Ribeye steak and side dishes at Park's BBQ. (Bret Hartman / For The Times ) Park's BBQ Park’s may no longer be the only top-end Korean barbecue place in town, and some of its fans may have gravitated to the nearby specialty houses concentrating on pork, intestines or bulgogi. But the beyond-prime short ribs, beef tongue and rare-breed pork belly at Park’s are of the highest possible standard, the banchan are inventive and fresh, and the cold noodles called naengmyon, the traditional finish to a barbecue meal, are tart and springy. Even things like stone-pot octopus, braised black cod and a simple kimchi jjigae have depths of flavor you may not expect. It is probably beyond argument that Jenee Kim’s modernist restaurant is still the best place in Koreatown to eat Korean barbecue.

Sesame chicken at Quarters. (Kathy M.Y. Pyon / Los Angeles Times) Quarters Perhaps you are one of those people searching for one of the few decent Mexican restaurants that also happen to serve margaritas. Or more to the point, you may yearn for a good Korean restaurant whose selection of alcohol extends past beer, soju and sweet raspberry wine, and where cheese dip might show up with the kimchi. Quarters, like its distant relation Kang-Ho Dong Baekjong across Chapman Plaza, serves richly marbled galbi and rib-eye, pork collar and pig jowl of surprisingly high quality — the place feels a little like an airport lounge — but in tiny quarter-pound portions that basically serve as snacks to go with a Slammin’ Strawberry Rita. If the idea of Korean nachos sounds exciting, you’re in the right place.

Tofu soup at Seongbukdong. (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times) Seongbukdong Everybody will tell you to go to Seongbukdong for the galbi jjim, and they are absolutely correct. The long-braised short ribs, cooked with housemade soy sauce and a kitchen’s worth of aromatics, have the sweet breath and soft, slightly fibrous chew that speak of comfort, tradition and long afternoons at grandmother’s house. The braised mackerel with chile is among the best bites of seafood in Koreatown, cooked in a way that accentuates its fishiness instead of quieting it. Even the bean-paste soup, a standard on almost every Korean menu, is extraordinary here, with a deep, salty note of fermentation that cuts through its richness like a bassoon.

Jorim, braised black cod, at Soban. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times ) Soban When somebody asks me to name the best dish in Koreatown, I invariably tell them to try Soban’s ganjang gaejang, an ultrafresh raw crab briefly marinated in housemade soy sauce — a glorious, gelatinous, sea-briny mess. The crabs are expensive and never as large as you wish they would be. If Soban weren’t so genteel, you can almost imagine yourself wrestling for the leg, scooping up rogue lumps of roe, or turning the shell over to scrape out whatever fragments of tomalley might have adhered to the inside. Before the crab, there will have been Soban’s famous presentation of 18 or so banchan, the tiny side dishes that form Act 1 of a Korean meal. The spicy galbi jjim, the ubiquitous braised short-rib preparation, is just stunning here, as weightless and as caramelized as an effort by a Michelin-starred chef. And it would be a mistake to leave without trying the eundaegu jorim, a gorgeous, spicy casserole starring braised black cod.

Soot Bull Jeep No one, I think, has ever claimed that Soot Bull Jeep was the best Korean barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles. Even in its earliest days there were always places that were fancier or used better cuts of meat. But Soot Bull Jeep, which is still the only restaurant in Koreatown to rely solely on live coals, has always been a lot of people’s favorite KBBQ — not just soju and platters of marinated raw meat, but smoke, fire and showers of small cinders that can leave your shirt looking like one of the Three Stooges after an encounter with an exploding cigar.

Sun Ha Jang Korean barbecue, yes. But more to the point, Korean duck barbecue: sliced duck breast cooked on heavy iron grills in a room thick with the miasma of vaporized fat. You snatch the slices from the grill as they cook and incorporate them into a kind of endless duck salad. The non-breast parts of the duck cook slowly, rendering into cracklings if you can bear to wait that long. And the best part, as always, is the fried rice at the end made with the collected duck fat and scraps of kimchi from the table; sweet and spicy and crisp.

Galbi jjim, a short rib stew, at Sun Nong Dan. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Sun Nong Dan The restaurant is named after an archaic term for sullungtang, a gentle bone broth famous for its effectiveness as a morning-after tonic. But the swelling crowd outside the tiny Koreatown storefront is there for the short-rib stew, galbi jjim, which is pretty much everything about Korean cooking cranked up to 10 — a violent red lagoon of meat and broth, hissing and bubbling, enveloped in a small universe of steam. If you have ordered it with cheese — you have to order it with cheese — a waiter scoops a big handful of white stuff over the top and blasts it with a torch until the mass breaks down into oozing, char-flecked rivulets that stretch from your chopsticks like pizza goo.

Wako Korean chefs are fond of riffing on sashimi, ramen, Westernized yoshuko dishes and other staples of Japanese cuisine, although it could be argued that Korean cooking has had a far greater influence on the kitchens of Japan. So the idea of donkasu, the Korean take on the Japanese take on Portuguese fried pork, was almost inevitable. And the donkasu at Wako is wonderful — perfectly crunchy cutlets of pork or chicken, about the size of deep-fried Zagat guides, served with cabbage salad and a bowl of miso soup, and a tiny ridged bowl into which you’ve ground toasted sesame seeds with a pestle, then topped off with a perfumed dipping sauce.

Cold naeng myun from Yu Chun (Kathy M.Y. Pyon / Los Angeles Times) Yu Chun How cold is Yu Chun's mool chic naengmyun? So cold that it gives you an ice cream headache. So cold that the tangy beef broth builds up in soft drifts in the middle of the bowl. So cold that the customary beverage is peppery beef broth served in metal mugs, warmed to stave off the frosty chill. There are any number of restaurants in Koreatown well known for their cold noodles, including the Corner Place, whose sugary dongchimi gook soo recipe is better guarded than state secrets seem to be at the moment. But when the temperature leans toward three digits and the asphalt begins to soften, even the thought of Yu Chun's stretchy black noodles can be enough to cool you down.

Yukdaejang Yukdaejang, the first American outpost of a largish Korea-based chain, specializes in yukgaejang, a spicy, ruddy beef soup shot through with slippery cellophane noodles. The menu is small. There are those yukgaejang, a version made with thick, hand-cut noodles; and a pretty straight-ahead sullongtang, the long-simmered bone broth with which all the soups are made, which is delicious, with a pronounced roast-meat flavor usually missing in bone broth. And the marinated garlic leeks that appear with the banchan are sharp and lovely. If you need a starter (you won’t), the delicate steamed mandoo have a finesse rarely seen in Koreatown dumplings.