This year marks the 30th anniversary of my only trip to South Korea, and I thought I’d dive head first back into a culture that left me with so many memories, however blurred for various reasons.
Teaching a troop of Korean marines how to shoot tequila in a rough-and-tumble seashore bar in Sogcho. Walking through a forest of cherry blossoms in full bloom in Jinhae. Hearing a South Korean rock band sing “Happy Birthday” to me in Korean in a club in Seoul.
That’s not to mention some of the best food I’ve had in East Asia. Ever since that trip, bulgogi, Korea’s barbecue, has been one of my regular cravings. In 1970s South Korea, before commercialism sold the country’s Seoul in the 1988 Summer Olympics, they prepared it on huge flat iron stoves where everyone sat around in a communal feast.
Last week in Los Angeles, 2 miles from where I left USC’s football practice and where tanned coeds gossiped under palm trees, I found that true Korean culture again.
Maybe more than I bargained for.
Koreatown is a 5-square-mile neighborhood between Western and Vermont avenues and Wilshire and Olympic boulevards. It is home to 340,000 people, the third-most densely populated neighborhood in the U.S. outside Manhattan and Chicago’s North Side. The skyline was wall-to-wall Korean letters. Korean massage. All-you-can-eat Korean. Korean bailbonds.
In a tacky strip mall, I was sure I would find the true bulgogi. The restaurant’s sign, of course, was in Korean. The restaurant was packed, with Koreans. Stretching from inside the restaurant out into the strip mall’s parking lot was a line, filled with Koreans.
This place couldn’t be more authentic Korean if a Shaman was the maitre d’.
Unfortunately, when I backpacked my way around South Korea I should’ve learned a little more about Korean vocabulary. The name of the restaurant is Western Soon Dae. Guess what soondae means in Korean? It’s not bulgogi.
Try blood sausage.
After a sweaty man in a white T-shirt sat me down at a crowded table, I knew this would not resemble a trip down East Sixth Avenue to Seoul Food, my favorite Korean eatery in Denver. I was the only non-Korean in the packed room. The walls had none of the pretty traditional paintings of Korean mountains and lakes. They were adorned with laminated pictures of the dishes, some of which looked hauntingly similar to those I found in rural China.
The menu, thankfully in English on one side, had no signs of the thinly sliced marinated beef of my dreams. I asked the 20ish waiter about bulgogi. He merely laughed. I may as well have asked if he had pasta carbonara.
With trepidation usually reserved for the dentist’s chair, I ordered the soondae. The presentation was beautiful — in a gastronomical sort of way. Five blood sausages, all chopped into bite-sized pieces, were placed neatly in the middle of a circle of dubious meats.
Ever looked up the definition of blood sausage? It’s defined as “boiled pigs intestines.” This was no Dodger Dog. The inside of the sausage looked like a coagulation of a million tiny dead worms. It was as soft and mushy as sponge cake with an odd sweet taste to it.
It was tolerable, but not worth learning the Korean phrase for “to go.” I asked the older woman next to me about the other meats on the plate. She started pointing to various body parts. Want to impress your friends? Eat pig’s lung. It tastes surprisingly like roast beef.
The good news is the restaurant was spotless and the food was healthy. I went to sleep with no side effects. But USC’s fight song was no longer playing in my head.
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
If you go
Western Soon Dae, 543 S. Western Ave., Los Angeles, 213-389-5288.
