7. Bonjuk

152-26 Northern Boulevard (153rd Street), 718-939-5868

Juk (savory rice porridge)

Every night is a party at many Korean restaurants in Queens, and you rarely see anyone eating alone. You do at Bonjuk, though. This is where you go when you stayed at the party too long. The dining room is spare and calming, like a teahouse inside a spa. A sonata for violin and piano played softly one recent night. “Well Being Slow Food,” reads a sign on the wall. The slow food in question is juk, usually described as rice porridge, although porridge sounds like punishment while juk should taste like a reward, or at least a consolation prize. The flavor of the juk with mushrooms and oysters was a bit undeveloped, but the ginseng-chicken variety tasted as if a worried grandmother had fussed over it all day. The intensely good octopus-kimchi juk is for those days when nothing will restore you but spicy heat.

8. Geo Si Gi

152-28 Northern Boulevard (153rd Street), 718-888-0001

Kamja tang (spicy pork stew)

A sign in Korean tells the story of the dish nearly everybody orders at Geo Si Gi, hunks of braised pork loin half-submerged like icebergs in a fiery-red broth bubbling over a gas burner. It’s called kamja tang, sometimes described as potato stew, although a server insisted that a more accurate translation was “very tender meat stew.” Very, very tender it is, barely hanging on to its shaft of backbone. There are six kamja tangs on the menu with varying spice levels and extras (one go-for-broke version incorporates raw octopus, shrimp and green-lipped mussels that cook in the stew). The broth has a rounded sweetness and a many-layered depth that soaks into the fat noodles at the bottom of the pot.

9. Mad for Chicken

157-18 Northern Boulevard (158th Street), 718-321-3818

Fried chicken

Of the half-dozen or so fried chicken dispensaries along and off Northern Boulevard, Mad for Chicken is the liveliest, a self-described “Korean gastro pub” with hockey and football on TV, American rock and pop on the speakers, macrobrews on tap and a menu that is what TGI Friday’s would serve if it were taken over by a 25-year-old Korean hipster. (Should you be struck with a midnight craving for poutine with corn, Mad for Chicken awaits you.) It also has my favorite chicken; a puffed-up golden shell hovers just above the flesh, and a spicy garlic sauce that is a little more savory and less sugary than the competitors’.

10. Bada Story

161-23 Crocheron Avenue (162nd Street),718-321-9555

Hwe (raw seafood)

The dry-ice fog slinking off each platter of raw fluke at Bada Story may foreshadow the mist of confusion that will surround anybody who approaches this restaurant’s specialty, hwe, with the idea that it is Korean sashimi. By the time the Japanese showed up with their very different take on raw seafood, Korea already had fixed ideas about the subject. Crunch, chew and snap are prized over melting tenderness. Instead of being dipped lightly in soy sauce, the sea creature in question can be subjected to a barrage of fermented soybean paste, salted sesame oil, vinegared chile paste, chopped jalapeños and garlic.

A Bada Story feast (bring a crowd) might start with some excellent fried fingers of fish and a first-rate seafood pancake, then move on to a tableau of marine life not seen on the sashimi special at your corner sushi bar: chewy sea squirts with their wrinkled orange skin; strips of sea cucumber that unfurl like streamers from your chopsticks but tense up again when you bite down; sea worms that look like veins and taste like not very much but have chewiness to spare. Then, in a swirl of mist, arrives a whole imported Korean fluke that a few minutes ago was lounging at the bottom of a pool by the kitchen. The slices, draped over frosty ceramic cups to keep them firm, are arranged as they were on the skeleton, with the lightly crunchy hard-working muscles around the fins showcased at the edge of the platter.

11. Bangane

165-19 Northern Boulevard (165th Street),718-762-2799

Korean black goat

Posters of goats hang on the walls of Bangane, goats with rakishly wavy black hair and an ambiguous twinkle in their eyes. The twinkle might mean “follow me and learn the secret of my goatish vigor” or it might mean “I want to eat your belt.” It’s hard to tell with goats.

The patrons of Bangane, though, have goatish vigor on their minds. “Korean people eat it when they want to make babies,” a server said as he brought out a steamer basket lined with garlic chives on which was mounded enough boiled goat to fill a maternity ward. Dark and tender, mild and lean, the meat may not immediately result in a procreative mood. But the more you dunk it in chile paste mixed with crunchy perilla seeds, the more of it you eat, the more energy you have for dunking and eating. This is lucky because as soon as you say you have had enough goat, the rest of it along with the chives and chile paste are tossed into a pot set over a gas burner next to the table. Broth from the kitchen is poured in and in no time the second course is ready: black-goat soup. There is energy in this, too, combined with the mind-focusing power of hot chiles and green perilla leaves. There is a third course, goat fried rice stirred together while the soup comes to a boil. But it is the first two dishes that send you into the night with an ambiguous twinkle in your eyes.