Note: Just catching up on some old stuff before I get to my travels in London, India and Provence. 

When I lived in Korea, one of my favorite meals was tak kalbi, a mess of chile-paste marinated chicken stir-fried on a griddle at your table with napa cabbage and logs of rice cakes.

I equally love its traditional partner, the refreshing mak kuksu: cold unrefined buckwheat noodles, usually in a chilled broth. I think it’s more interesting than the better-known naeng myun – mak kuksu comes laced with red chile sauce and garnished with toasted seaweed and sesame seeds. Like tak kalbi, it’s a specialty of Chuncheon-do, a province on South Korea’s east coast.  

Los Angeles’ Koreatown is doubtless as good as it gets for Korean food choices in America, but there’s not much in the way of regional specialties. (For a look at some others, click here.) A nice and shiny tak kalbi restaurant existed for a while in a minimall on 8th Street (as did a restaurant whose Korean sign proclaimed that it sold dog soup), but after it closed there was only this kind of sketchy-looking place on Olympic, a few blocks east of the Koreatown Galleria. OK, even in Korea some of the best restaurants are deceptively crappy looking, but it still took me a long time to get around to trying it.

The menu is pretty brief. There’s tak kalbi, samgyeopsal (grilled pork belly), pork kalbi, and … actually, that might be it. I can’t remember whether they had beef. No mak kuksu, I was disappointed to find.

But the tak kalbi hits the spot. This isn’t a refined dish, so I’m not going to rave about the nuances; just know that the spicy-sweet seasoning permeates and does lovely things to the satisfyingly chewy rice cakes, which soften beautifully as they cook; the tender chicken; and the crunchy cabbage. And what sets this version apart is plenty of kkaenip, an anise-scented herb that haunts my dreams. Good on you, Mapo Galbi.

Mapo Galbi
3090 W. Olympic Boulevard
Koreatown
(213) 487-2274