Plus: there’s a bit of a show as the waitress swaps out your cooking surface for a cleaner one.įor our third meat–after the short rib and Bulgogi–we ordered the “Special Pork Belly.” You dunk it in a sweet brown sauce and it’s really wonderful how flavorful it all is. Look at it several minutes later, so dark and crispy and flavorful. Then the next batch of meat came…Bulgogi (seasoned sliced beef). When we finished that round–Gal-Bi, prime beef short rib on the bone–the waitress threw large mushrooms on the grill. (*This actually isn’t caramelization, it’s the Maillard reaction, but let’s not be prissy about all that, ok?)
The waitress came by to slice our meat into manageable pieces…which also helped them caramelize* further. Park’s showed me how much I’d been missing! If you love meat, is there anything more wonderful than all kinds of marinated beef thrown on to a hot grill right in front of you, slowly going from pink to brown to dark golden brown? That’s because I’ve only had it one other time in my life and that was with my friend Patty when I was writing my first book. Now if you search the archives of my blog you may be startled to find that I’ve never blogged about Korean BBQ before.
I can’t tell you much about what all of that is, but the stuff that looks like pineapple was really a bowl of pickled turnips…which I really liked. Right away we were presented with banchan, the small dishes that are almost always included with Korean BBQ. Thankfully, ours was and we were seated right away. A manager had to approve it before your reservation was accepted. The place was bustling but luckily, the day before, I made a reservation on their website…which was more like filling out an application. transplant friends Jim and Jess and we headed to Park’s in Koreatown. So this past Saturday, I gathered up a group, including our new L.A. Korean BBQ was pretty high up there, and in my browser where I have a folder called LaFood and subfolders like “Chinese,” “Ramen,” “Sushi,” “Thai,” there’s a folder that says “Korean” and Park’s BBQ is featured prominently in there. As I gear up to go to New York for three months, I’m starting to check things off my L.A.