MESSY, spicy, crab and seafood hot pots are, you could say, hot right now on L.A.'s Korean-dining scene. A restaurant called On Dal 2, one of the brightest stars among the places dedicated to this specialty, sits off the Koreatown radar on a restaurant-scarce stretch of Washington Boulevard near La Brea Avenue.
Opened nine months ago, it's a near clone of a restaurant in South Korea owned by the family of On Dal 2's proprietor, Kihoa Kim, whose wife, Hyo-Sook, does the cooking here.
Many crab shack devotees know the drill at such beloved Maryland spots as Obrycki's or the Cracked Claw, where buckets of crustaceans are brought forth with wooden mallets for shell cracking. A meal at On Dal 2, though similarly ritualistic, is a tad more genteel, fabulously tasty and insanely service-intensive.
First a waiter places a steaming pot of broth on the table's embedded burner. "This crab cake is the family's recipe," he announces, spooning a soft, luscious substance, somewhat reminiscent of a dumpling filling, from the dish-shaped crab shell in which it cooked. Crunchy pinpoints of caviar-like crab roe shoot bursts of flavor into each bite.
As the waiter serves, we tie on the heavy cotton bibs that match the restaurant's chair coverings, one of many carefully attended-to details here. You also have Hyo-Sook Kim's beautifully-made panchan to nibble on: These side dishes may include a pie-size grilled vegetable pancake, chile-marinated pickles, a whole grilled pike, a wedge of omelet and gaejang -- a ceviche-like baby crab cured in red-hot bean paste.
The bubbling broth gets its delicate ocean perfume from sea-squirts, leathery barnacle-like creatures filled with briny juices; some diners like to suck out the juice of these otherwise inedible creatures.
Next, wielding a hefty pair of kitchen shears, our waiter extracts one of the crabs from the cooking pot and begins readying it for easy eating. With a flourish, he quarters it, snips off the leg ends and cuts open the remaining shell for easier extracting.
Around the room, people in groups of six, eight and more are leaning over strategically placed bowls positioned to catch juices. Mini mountains of rumpled paper napkins amass on the tables as diners ferret out every bit of meat using reed-slender crab spoons. Cut shells or not, mining for the sweet, snowy meat is no dainty chore. As one diner would later comment, "Wonderful, but not exactly a great first-date meal."
