Midtown Lunch

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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Last month LA Weekly reported that Jeon Ju, the famed hot stone pot Bibimbap specialist that Jonathan Gold calls one of the 60 Korean Dishes that every Angeleno should know, had closed for what appeared to be some pretty substantial renovations. Well, as promised, they were only closed for about a week and a half, and not only did they renovate the interior they also updated the menu. Their back open and instead of 5 versions of dol sot bibimbap, they now have 8- including 2 that will be particularly exciting to vegetarians.

And the best part is, they didn’t even raise the prices.

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I’m sorry shabu shabu. I don’t how I went so long without singing your praises. I have no excuse. You are amazing and delicious and you deserve to be cheered with as much fervor as Korean BBQ or Tsukemen or any of the other great lunches that involve piles of cooked meat or dipping stuff into other stuff. Admittedly, it took me a long time to come to this realization but I’m ready to make it up to you. How does me eating at a shabu shabu place every single day for the next two weeks sound to you? Because I’m willing to sacrifice myself just to prove to you how sorry I am. And how much I love you.

Just one request. Can I make it up to you exclusively at Khan Shabu Shabu? Because I can’t imagine there’s a better lunchtime shabu shabu deal in all of Los Angeles.

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As a $10 all you can eat Korean BBQ devotee it didn’t take me long to realize that the best under $10 ayce Korean BBQ place is the newest under $10 ayce Korean BBQ place.  Stuffing your face with loads of grilled meat seems to be a dinner thing for most, but to draw people in for lunch many of these restaurants will offer the $10 ayce special just to get people in the door; the kalbi version of a loss leader.  The problem is that once the place gets super popular at lunchtime, they need to either cut back on quality or raise the price.  And while the average Korean lunchtime tourist may not notice, the devotee begins to look for new pastures.

When Don Day started to slip, I moved on to Bud Namu (which is great if you love bulgogi.) But my new favorite might be a place hidden on the second floor of the Cosmos Village strip mall on Western btw. 3rd and 4th. Man Kang if you believe Yelp, Mr. Lee if you go by the sign over the door.

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If you had asked me a few months ago where I like to go for kimbap (think: Korean futomaki) in L.A. I would have said School Food. Their massive platters of Korean sushi feature over 10 different kinds of kimbap, a selection that I believe is unparalleled in K-Town.  But there are drawbacks to School Food, not least of which is price, its horrible location (on the top floor of a weird Korean mall on Western), and the fact that I’m not a Korean teenager.  But now that Squid Ink’s Garrett Snyder has clued me in to Gaju Naengmyeon, I now have a kimbap alternative that doesn’t make me feel like a sketchy old man.

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After this epic Thai Town crawl w/ Jet Tila yielded some pretty great finds, I felt pretty comfortable tagging along with Food Republic’s Jason Kessler a few weeks ago for another Asian food crawl, this time through Koreatown. While I can’t relate to his feelings about Asian food (I thought loving Chinese food was part of the genetic makeup of Jews, like a culinary tay-sachs if you will), the dude is a good guy and I will never turn down an excuse to eat four lunches in succession.  And while I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job of stuffing my face in K-Town (with the help of guides like The Guru, Mattatouille and @samkimsamkim), it’s always nice to see a neighborhood from a new perspective.  And most of all I hoped that maybe I’d end up being introduced to something completely new and cool.

Well, if you read Jason’s post then you know that it didn’t quite turn out that way. Our Korean food guide was no Jet Tila, and Haus is no Bhan Kanom Thai.  But there was one thing that we tried on our first stop, that kind of blew everybody away.  It’s called duruchigi, and at Moo Dae Po 2 they serve it to us in a giant shovel.  Of course always being skeptical of organized media eating, I returned last week to see if this “shovel” existed for real people.  Or if it was just some kind of PR mirage rolled out for the big guns at Food Republic…

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When Eater dropped their 14 best restaurants in K-Town list back in February, Oo Kook was the only all you can eat BBQ joint to make the cut. It’s a place a number of my Korean friends have been telling me about for a while being that I am white and fat, the two important pre-requisites for loving ayce Korean BBQ. Sadly it’s $20 for lunch, making it a bit out of my price range for a typical K-Town weekday lunch.  But all is not lost!  Oo Kook offers a bunch of incredibly worthy lunch specials, one of which is something I’ve been looking for on a K-Town lunch menu for a long long time.

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