The manduguk (pork belly and dumpling soup) at Spoon By H, a dessert cafe in the heart of Los Angeles’s Fairfax District, is already famous. One taste reveals an instant classic worthy of mention alongside the likes of the Langer’s No. 19 or the mole at Guelaguetza.

The steaming, garlic-infused mixture of broths (the components of which are a secret) holds a kaleidoscope of flavors and textures: soft chunks of pork belly, al dente mung bean noodles, crunchy fried onions that offer a hint of nuttiness, chewy tteok (ovaline rice cakes, in this instance), and pillowy dumplings with just-thick-enough wrappers. All the elements come together into a dish that, quite simply, makes you want more. So does a lot of what Spoon By H’s chef-owner, Yoonjin Hwang, has to offer.

Spoon By H looks the part of a humble dessert cafe. First opened in 2012, it has 28 seats total, including the two small two-tops on the patio flanking the entrance. Upon entering, the bright and colorful decor (marked by hand-painted cartoon portraits and throw pillows) suggests a place to grab a lychee-grape smoothie or shaved ice with seasonal fruits while catching up with a friend. Don’t let its appearance fool you: Something amazing is happening with the Korean food here.

To fully understand the experience at Spoon By H, you have to get to know Hwang’s personality. During low order-volume periods, “Yoon,” as she’s known to her regulars, greets her guests personally and asks patrons about their preferences, suggests menu items, and maybe brings them some cookies on the house. It’s this level of service, in conjunction with the outstanding food, that led Momofuku empire-builder David Chang to call Spoon By H his “restaurant of the year” in a November 2018 Instagram post.

“Two weeks after [Chang’s] Instagram post, Friday and Saturday nights became so busy,” Hwang said in Korean during an interview with Eater.

She is thankful for the additional exposure, but the hype machine is clearly taking a toll on the small storefront. For one, Hwang’s presence in the dining room is increasingly rare on Fridays and Saturdays due to the dramatically increased order volume. Her family members help take orders and bring out the food, though Hwang still does much of the cooking by herself. In the event of overwhelming demand, she may temporarily discontinue certain dishes to allow the kitchen to catch up. Usually the stoppages last between 15 and 30 minutes.

Hwang is mum about the obstacles she’s facing. Yet even trained chefs would consider the sheer breadth of menu preparations to be unreasonably difficult. On any given day, she alone executes a staggering range of dishes: from boiled manduguk to fresh-baked cookies to noodles to shaved ice to waffles griddled to order — all in a kitchen space that is a fraction of the size of the already-minuscule dining area.

Don’t let its appearance fool you: Something amazing is happening with the Korean food here.

Hwang’s journey to the United States from her native South Korea began with a piano audition. Her interpretation of Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu at the age of 13 earned her a scholarship to Idyllwild Arts Academy in Idyllwilld, California (roughly a three-hour drive east of Los Angeles).

She then attended Manhattan School of Music’s preparatory division, where she performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall before graduating in 1997. It was almost immediately thereafter that the Asian Financial Crisis swept through Korea, weakening the Korean won dramatically against the dollar. Hwang’s father, who worked at a securities firm, was caught in its wake.

“To that point all I knew was piano, and I acted like a princess and cruised through school, never having to worry about money,” Hwang said. “When the [Asian Financial Crisis] hit, my whole life changed. Our family’s financial situation became extremely difficult. My parents told me to stay in New York and continue with my studies, but I’m the oldest child. I knew it was my duty to start helping the family.”

As a result, Hwang put college on an indefinite hold and began teaching private piano lessons and working part time at a cafe. During her time at the cafe, she picked up on the details that made the business successful while also volunteering as a piano accompanist at her local church on the weekends. Once her visa was set to expire, she returned home to Korea, where she started an esthetic spa. The spa, which keenly specialized in facial massages in a country that has a $6 billion skincare industry, was a success.

Once things started to settle down financially for her family, Hwang told Eater that she realized her parents were disheartened that she hadn’t been able to finish school. “So I saw that there was a video audition available as an application,” she said, “and it was past the deadline, but I submitted one anyway.”

The bet paid off: Hwang received a scholarship to Oberlin College and Conservatory in Oberlin, Ohio. She sold the esthetic spa to one of her regulars and went to the prestigious Midwest conservatory to become a pipe organist.

The pipe organ is a complex instrument to master. A modern pipe organ console contains at least four keyboard tiers and a pedal board — an overwhelming number of inputs. It requires coordination not only of one’s hands, arms, and eyes, but the added potential to pedal an entire melody with one’s feet. The instrument demands an extreme level of concentration and coordination from the musician’s entire body.

“The pipe organ is not only the loudest instrument,” Hwang says, laughing. “If you make a mistake, it lasts for seven or eight seconds.”

One of her highlights at Oberlin came when she performed Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor for a live radio audience at Warner Concert Hall in 2006.

In Korean culture, those who eat everything on a plate are said to be unfussy and pure in their intentions.

“After playing organ once, I felt like the piano was too simple,” Hwang said. “The pipe organ has a certain charm, since it’s difficult. Perhaps it’s because it was so difficult that I was drawn to it? I always get excited to try something when someone says, ‘it’s difficult,’ or ‘it’s impossible.’”

The words “difficult” and “impossible” certainly come to mind when one observes Hwang on a Saturday night at Spoon by H: She sometimes takes orders at the point-of-sale, then pulls the order ticket herself inside in the kitchen, prepares a batch of seafood pasta or manduguk and puts it on the heat, then goes back to the front-of-house to apologize to customers for the wait, all while mentally timing how many seconds remain before she needs to go back inside and finish off her orders.

All of this is to say that the experience Hwang provides certainly isn’t scalable — and that’s part of what makes it so special. For Hwang, optimizing a business for profit takes a backseat to taking care of her customers.

“For me, the best feeling is seeing people eat well with nothing left over,” Hwang said. “When I see that, it makes me so happy.”

Hwang expresses a phrase in her native Korean that carries cultural significance. Saying someone eats well in Korean, “bap jal meok-neun-da,” is loaded with a positive assessment of that person’s character. In Korean culture, those who feel comfortable eating everything on a plate are said to be unfussy and pure in their intentions. Hwang cooks to draw these favorable qualities out in her diners — even if it’s just for a moment at a dessert cafe. Seeing someone eat with gusto and finish dishes is the only measure of success she needs.

Cleaning off the plate at Spoon By H isn’t exactly difficult, by the way. The specials and menu items are engineered for that purpose. Hwang’s creative process seems to begin with a series of questions she’s trying to answer by experimenting with Korean comfort food.

Some of these questions might be “What would a bowl of janchi guksu (banquet soup noodles) taste like if it had a ramen-like broth and pork belly and a beef rib thrown in?” or “How would this manduguk taste if I added garlic and Italian red pepper?”

Each Sunday, Hwang, a devout Christian, closes shop so she can attend church and do some research and draw inspiration. She’ll eat everywhere from Irvine’s Houston’s (“Their bread is so, so good,” she exclaims), to Little Saigon’s Pho 79, to Arts District’s Bavel.

“I first got the inspiration to do manduguk after I saw it on chef David Chang’s Instagram,” Hwang said. “I noticed he liked Myung-In Dumpling’s manduguk. When I tasted it, I wanted to try making something different.”

She’s also unafraid of combining unconventional flavors and textures. For instance, mung bean noodles aren’t traditionally included in manduguk, but they’re a welcome addition in Spoon By H’s rendition.

Hwang suggests that the routes to obtaining the tastes, textures, and subsequent emotions of Korean comfort food can vary. She finds joy in discovering these uncharted routes to eminently craveable comfort food, and her tremendous attention to detail elevates humble Korean home cooking to a level that simply can’t be found in any of the city’s many Korean restaurants.

Take, for instance, the Spam kimchi fried rice. The classic Korean home staple is packed with generous amounts of its namesake meat, amber-colored extra-fermented mukeunji (very aged) kimchi, and crowned with a sunny-side-up egg. Hwang prepares batches of rice throughout the day in small batches, so the grains are just firm enough to hold an even coating of all of the dish’s rich accoutrements. The dish is festooned with flavoring elements that the diner can add to taste: There’s another slice of Spam on the side and a sunny-side-up egg without a hint of browning, which makes it easy to cut and distribute the egg whites with a spoon.

And then there are the drinks and desserts. The “Teaffee” beverage set combines elements of ice-blended milk tea with massive coffee-bean-shaped coffee ice cubes. On the side is a shot of espresso, a scoop of house-made milk tea ice cream, and some more milk tea slush. Like the dish above, all of these elements act as condiments the diner can add to taste. None of it is too sweet. If anything, Spoon By H seems to be going easy on the sweetness and salt just about everywhere, which is atypical of the Korean dessert cafe genre.

The one exception, it seems, is in the bingsu, or shaved ice, with fresh mango. Visit when mangoes are in season, and the dish is a showstopper. The mangoes Hwang uses are silky and almost custard-like in texture. The fruit melts away into a mellow but prominent natural sweetness, with absolutely none of the grassiness and thready texture of the more resilient Tommy Atkins cultivar available in most U.S. supermarkets. Diners can also customize their shaved ice to be made entirely from frozen coconut milk and top it with agave drizzle to make it 100 percent vegan.

Despite all of these detailed touches, Hwang constantly insists she isn’t a chef. She points to the fact that she’s self-taught, and says she cannot claim such a title because she lacks classical training. But Hwang is becoming her own sort of expert at creating the kind of food you want to eat again and again, and she tests recipes in a way that resembles a true chef’s process.

For example, taken by the pleasure of the thin dumpling wrappers on Din Tai Fung’s famous xiaolongbao (pork soup dumplings), Hwang sought to incorporate a similar style of wrapper for the dumplings in her manduguk. She first recreated a high-fidelity prototype of Din Tai Fung’s version, then calibrated her recipe for her own application. A wrapper that’s too thin might tear too easily around a loosely packed dumpling in a boiling hot soup like the manduguk. Too thick, and the texture of boiled dough may overwhelm the bite. So Hwang iterates, tests, removes an increment of the variable of flour here or add some water there until it reaches the desired result.

Despite the analytical approach, the attention to detail, and the ability to conjure crave-worthy food, Hwang’s chief concern about the “chef” label seems to be that she would not be accepted by her peers due to her lack of a culinary school background.

David Chang is prepared to lay waste to such notions; he warns diners not to bias themselves against the dessert cafe’s unorthodox environs. In an analogy drawn between the restaurant industry and professional basketball, Chang likens Hwang’s potential to that of Greek-born professional basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpo. Antetokounmpo, a 24-year-old wunderkind who started playing basketball at the relatively late age of 13 in Greece, skipped college basketball entirely and took an unconventional route to the NBA. The player’s meteoric rise in 2019 has him poised to become the league’s Most Valuable Player — and the heir apparent to basketball icon LeBron James.

“Don’t judge them on some idea of monoculture foodie perfection… if you walk into Spoon By H and try to judge it against [traditional restaurants], you might miss out and be disappointed,” Chang said. “You will basically be saying that no good basketball players can come from Greece. Yeah, I’m saying Yoonjin could develop into Giannis [Antetokounmpo]. No guarantees, but how fucking amazing would that be?”

Spoon by H. 7158 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036. 12 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Monday to Saturday. Closed Sundays.