";s:4:"text";s:5761:" A number of LA restaurants have resumed outdoor dining service. Here now are the 10 finest Korean barbecue restaurants in Los Angeles and Orange County offering outdoor grilling. Cocktails, fusion-infused food and modern décor attract a fun-loving crowd to this KBBQ restaurant in Koreatown.
Located in the heart of Los Angeles’ Korea town district, Park’s BBQ is considered by many to be the best of the best. Highly trained servers make sure each piece of thick-cut pork belly is golden-brown on the outside before slicing each hunk into bite-sized slivers to finish cooking on graded stone grills. Tenraku is a high-end Korean barbecue spot that has taken over its front parking lot with covered tables and camp stoves for comfortable outdoor grilling. Enter through a difficult-to-find door on the ground floor of Focus Plaza and the first thing to notice is an entire area dedicated to dry-aged beef. TK92 just says “yes.” The prepared food can be uneven (as in, not good at all) but behind all of the possibilities TK92 is currently entertaining, it is downright intriguing to see what the restaurant will become. If Korean barbecue is simply meat, a couple sides, and a steady stream of somek (a combination of Korean beer and soju), Kang Ho Dong is the minimalist’s mecca. With a mini-arcade for diners to play while they wait for a table, pervasive manga themes (and huge manga murals on the walls), to the creepy voice on the intercom in the bathroom teaching people various restaurant-relevant phrases in Korean, the restaurant is massive. $$Barbeque, Korean. The meat quality is good enough for AYCE, with not-so-thin chadol baeggi and a soy sauce-forward marinated galbi joomooleok. Thoughtful touches like complimentary nokdujeon (mung bean pancakes) are only the more welcome for the fact that they’re hefty enough to give a pleasant crumble from the just-cooked-through mung bean batter, but not so thick as to overwhelm the crunchiness of the pancake’s bronzed exterior.The mulnaengmyeon is worth a pilgrimage itself — it’s Pyeongyang-style and perhaps the tops in Southern California, if not the rest of the country. Park’s BBQ’s worthiest contender in end-to-end menu execution might be this humble family-owned operation in Orange County.Sookdal, a Korea-based chain with its only stateside locations currently in Duluth, Georgia and Garden Grove, California, has the high-end samgyeopsal experience in South Korea basically cornered.
This OG Koreatown spot is a little fancier and pricier …
Touches like using laser thermometers to check grill temperatures to zebra tags indicating how long the meat has been wet-aged only reassure a point belabored: this is a pork belly purist’s paradise.Sookdal is a picture of the Korean barbecue future, wedged into a quaint mini-mall in an area that was once a thriving Korean business district. Korean, Barbecue. Restaurants Korean Koreatown. From the deft execution of Korean cuisines standbys like kimchi jjigae and galbitang, to that perfectly snappy ohgyeopsal paired with the just-sour-enough amber-colored grilling kimchi, even the supporting cast is worthy of top billing. Modern Korean barbecue restaurant featuring superior cuts of Prime beef and first-rate complimentary dishes.
There's something appealingly primal about the experience — grilling rosy-red slabs of impossibly well-marbled beef atop hissing coals. Takeout. Highly trained servers make sure each piece of thick-cut pork belly is golden-brown on the outside before slicing each hunk into bite-sized slivers to finish cooking on graded stone grills. Polished and workmanlike, this Koreatown standby nails the standard dishes, making it friendly for Korean food neophytes yet satisfying for experts. For a neat hack, make sure to add in all the raw garlic into the grill with the rendering duck fat. The USDA Prime beef at How Soh Grill House is every bit as marbled as advertised, and the thick-cut pork belly and pork jowl is nothing to skip over. Quality meat and fish make for good do-it-yourself tableside barbecue. The first-wave Korean barbecue joint holds up against the new competition and it’s every bit the spot for smokey, sudsy satisfaction as it ever was. For Angelenos, the drive is long and the waits during peak dinner hours nearly unbearable, but fans of chadol baeggi brave the pilgrimage to north Orange County to taste thinly sliced morsels of beef, blushing pink and freckled with marbling. Smoky and noisy, this is one of the city's best spots for cook-it-yourself Korean barbecue over a tabletop charcoal grill. Sun Ha Jang is still the ideal change-of-pace play for seasoned Korean barbecue vets. Times like these call for a celebration of meat, smoke, and charKorean barbecue has become an integral part of Southern California’s culinary and cultural fabric. Nostalgia and charcoal can go a long way as one of the OG’s of the Korean barbecue game — especially when it’s been open three decades. 14/20.
The first-wave Korean barbecue joint holds up against the new competition and it’s every bit the spot for smokey, sudsy satisfaction as it ever was. Touches like using laser thermometers to check grill temperatures to zebra tags indicating how long the meat has been wet-aged only reassure a point belabored: this is a pork belly purist’s paradise.Sookdal is a picture of the Korean barbecue future, wedged into a quaint mini-mall in an area that was once a thriving Korean business district.