Midtown Lunch

If you were getting bored of the super tasty but small’ish menu at Seoul Sausage in Little Osaka, you’ll be excited to hear that they’ve added two new weekly specials to their mix of Korean sausages and Asian rice balls.  On Mondays they’ve been serving a marinated galbi (short ribs) over bibimbap, with a soft boiled egg.  And on Wednesdays they have a pork belly special, also with a soft boiled egg, served atop a spicy mixture of rice cakes and ramen noodles (aka lakboki).

Check out the Monday one after the jump…

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I’m going to give this place the benefit of the doubt and presume that their terrible name is completely unintentional.  After all Gangnam is a district in Korea, and there’s no use of the word “style” or any stupid music references in this otherwise modern but understated spot.

I’m also going to put aside the slightly higher-than-they-should-be prices, because it is on Melrose near La Brea and finding good Korean food outside of Koreatown is already an exercise in futility.  If paying a little extra is what it takes to get good soondubu west of Western, I’ll take it.  And make no mistake about it, this place serves up some good soondubu.

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No matter how you measure it, Koreatown is without a doubt the cheapest lunch neighborhood in Los Angeles.  Nowhere can you get as much good, hot food, for so little money as you do in the ever expanding corridor that starts between Western and Vermont. $5 will get you a pretty great bowl of noodles in black bean sauce, $6 will get you a decent bowl of soup or bibimbap and one of the best assortments of banchan in K’town. Hell, that same $6 can even get you a good Korean style chirashi sushi bowl. And, of course, there are the all you can eat BBQ places- where for as little as $9 during lunchtime you can feast on all the meat you can eat.

At this point not being able to get an under $10 soup or stew at a Koreatown restaurant is the exception not the rule- an exception that borders on extinction.  Now, you could be thinking “What about the expensive and famous restaurants?  Like Park’s BBQ! A meal at that place, lunch or dinner, can cost almost $50.  There’s no way they’re going to let you get out of there for lunch for under $10.”  And to that I say, “Guess again.”

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There are few things in life better than a great food court, especially here in L.A. where co-workers’ taste can range from “fat IT guy who will eat anything” to “fat IT Guy who doesn’t eat meat or gluten”.  In other words, finding a place that is suitable to all of your friends is damn near impossible in this city, which makes food courts the best.  Everybody gets what they want, everybody is happy.  Plus, there is never a shortage of (my personal favorite) shitty Chinese food.  What I’m saying is, I love food courts. And chances are you love them too- unless, of course, you’re some kind of communist.

So when I heard that DTLA’s new food court inside Fig at 7th had opened I was pretty excited.  Food courts have been getting progressively better over the past few years, either by incubating interesting new gourmet concepts (like Century City) or bringing in delicious transplants from ethnic neighborhoods (like the Fox Hills Mall).  Fig + 7th seems to be doing a little bit of both.  But deciding what I wanted to eat proved a little bit easier than I expected.

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Between Koreatown, Thai Town, the South Bay, Westminster, and the SGV, Los Angeles has no shortage of hilariously unfortunate, lost in translation restaurant names.  Of course when you discover one such place you have two options: be an adult and try to make sense of what the owners could have possibly meant (“It must be pronounced Toh Bahng, right?”).  Or just spend your entire lunch making foot based happy ending jokes.  I chose the latter.

But the truth is, it wasn’t the potential comedy that drew me to Toe Bang, the popular late night drinking spot in the same Koreatown plaza as Ho Dong Baekjeong.  It was their too good to be true sounding lunch specials, which I had read about here. That, plus I wanted to see if I could get a foot massage with my spicy pork. (Wait… that  doesn’t sound right. Or does it?)

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If you’ve been disgusted by the amount of Korean BBQ in my Instagram feed recently (I’m looking about you, people who care about my health) I assure you there has been a good reason for it.  Well, maybe “good” is a strong word.  But there has been a reason.  I’ve been participating in a project that required me to eat at 10 assigned Korean restaurants in L.A. in about 15 days.  It’s a tough life, I know.  Some were great Midtown Lunch spots that I know well, others I had never been to.  But there were 5 things I learned that would be useful next time you’re looking for a good Korean food lunch in L.A.

Galbi Jim ($15) w/ lunch special banchan

1. Over the past few months Kang Ho Dong Baekjong has assumed the mantle of hottest Korean BBQ spot in L.A., starting with this review in the L.A. Weekly and culminating in The Guru’s review last week. Sadly, it’s really tough to get out of there for under $20 if you want to grill your own meat, and their lunch specials are all of the non-BBQ variety (which is what the place is known for.)  That being said, their Shaken Dosirak ($8) lunch box is starting to make a name for itself, and they have a completely different set of banchan for those people who order lunch specials! (Including a pretty great marinated squid dish.)

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It’s been over two years since the Korean chain Bibigo opened its first U.S. location in Westwood Village, bringing fast food bibimbap and spicy pork to UCLA students and Westwood office workers.  And while writers who got treated to free meals raved about it, those of us who spend any time in Koreatown were slightly less enthusiastic.  A great Westwood lunch option, no doubt.  But nothing to get overly excited about.

Staying true to its goal of becoming the McDonald’s of Korean food, Bibigo has opened two more L.A. locations since then,  Including a “casual dining” location in Beverly Hills and most recently an outpost at the Century City Mall food court. And even more recently they added a few new items to the menu at their Westwood location, one of which is worth checking out.

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