At dusk, electronic billboards light up all along Vermont and Western avenues. Their glowing images flick and spin, pumping life into Korean-language signs advertising everything from karaoke bars to old-country herbal cures. The aroma of garlic wafts out of countless restaurants over the largest Korean enclave outside Asia.
Even in the late '70s, when Korean business had barely put down roots here, the 5 square miles between Pico Boulevard and Melrose Avenue from Hoover Street to Crenshaw Boulevard were home to more eating places than Chinatown. In the last 10 years, growth has escalated at a turbocharged pace. Daniel Oh, president of the National Korean Restaurant Coalition, points out that in 1992, Koreatown had 160 restaurants; now it has 450. The streets are ablaze with restaurant "grand opening" banners. Dinner-time traffic can be a madhouse, with mini-mall parking lot attendants heroically juggling twice as many cars as the lots can hold.
The Ambassador district along Wilshire Boulevard is Koreatown's newest status address. Here the ghostly closed Perino's and shuttered Cocoanut Grove nightclub recall the glamour era of wining and dining Hollywood royalty. The office towers that emptied in the '80s, when many Fortune 500 companies moved away, now hold Korean banks and professional offices. At the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Alexandria Avenue, the Brown Derby Plaza, built on the site of the illustrious restaurant where the Cobb salad was born, is filled with Korean-owned pubs, discos and eating spots.
Morangak, on the top floor, serving dishes from the North Korean city of Pyongyang, is patterned after a chain in South Korea. The laminated menu pictures the principal dishes: dumplings stuffed with pheasant, regional noodle bowls, the colorful vegetable dish goldongban and a fabulous stew of six or seven kinds of wild mushroom in a deeply flavored beef broth.
Up the street at the Wilshire B.B.Q. House, businesspeople are still finalizing deals at 2 a.m. In time-honored tradition they converse over soju--aptly called Korean vodka--and spicy dried octopus or seafood pancakes.
At Wilshire and Kingsley, you can sit down to a bubbling caldron of soon dubu (sometimes spelled sun dubu) 24 hours a day at BCD Tofu House. The fresh soft tofu is infused with a ferocious chile broth served so hot it cooks the raw egg served on the side. There's a choice of meats, seafood and vegetable toppings.
