After a week of decadent eating, during a spate of chilly weather earlier this year, my friend Ling begged me to take her to Han Bat, my favorite place for sullongtang. I was only too happy to comply.

Sullongtang, a milky soup of long-boiled beef bones, is the essence of beefiness, stocked with chewy, flavor-absorbing bean-thread noodles and slices of meat. But if you tasted it the way it comes to your table, you’d think, “What is this flavorless crap?” Relax, it just needs salt. You add your own – at some places it’s a mixture of salt and black pepper — as well as chopped scallions and, if you like, red pepper powder or paste for heat. Some people drop in a few cubes of kkaktugi, the diced-radish kimchi that’s the only traditional accompaniment for sullongtang.

The broth at Han Bat is the best I’ve had in L.A. OK, so the beef slices are often tough. Go for the tongue. Really. It has all the beefy flavor, is beautifully tender, and comes sliced so thin, you’d never know where it came from. They also offer a few varieties of beef cuts. Order it with “everything” and you’ll find knuckle, and I think tripe, in your bowl – definitely not what the same request would get you at McDonald’s.  

I’m always saddened by the small amount of noodles, but I usually just dump my rice into the broth (another excellent combination) and by the time I’ve finished that off too, I’m full.

But there’s always room for dessert, right? Just across Western Avenue, outside the entrance of California Supermarket, is a truck where they make ho ttuk, discs of fried dough filled with brown sugar, cinnamon and nuts.

It used to be staffed by Koreans, but lately it seems they’ve outsourced the labor to Latinas. They’re sold to go (the ho ttuk, I mean), but it’s safer to eat them on the spot — I can never resist one while driving, and the resulting sticky mess in my car must constitute some kind of moving violation.

God, I love these. How to describe the flavor? Um, fried dough. Brown sugar. Cinnamon. Nuts. It really is the sum of its parts.  

Han Bat
4163 W. 5th Street
Koreatown
(213) 388-9499