![]() Just as an American diner might be expected to serve grilled cheese sandwiches, Kobawoo House serves japchae, a sweet and savory dish made of sweet potato glass noodles stir-fried with spinach, scallions, peppers, soy sauce, and sugar in sesame oil. How to order: Call 21 or visit for takeout orders delivery via UberEats.Ī local favorite since 1985, Kobawoo House is a no-frills establishment whose menu reads like a must-have list of Korean comfort foods, offering everything from bulgogi (Korean BBQ beef) to bossam (boiled pork wrapped in cabbage) and everything in between. It’s no wonder why this restaurant has been a Koreatown staple since 1993. Its unassuming exterior belies its charming, traditionally inspired interior, which is reminiscent of hanok, traditional Korean homes featuring broad white walls and wood accents. ![]() Like many of Koreatown’s best restaurants, Chunju Han-il Kwan sits inside a strip mall off a very busy main street. ![]() The jeon served here is perfectly cooked, with a crispy exterior and a soft and slightly chewy inside. Although most know this restaurant for their delicious budae jjigae (Korean Army stew), locals also love Chunju Han-il Kwan for their authentic jeon: savory, fried pancakes in flavors like seafood, oyster, potato, scallion, and kimchi, that are served in cast-iron skillets. During Seollal, the most commonly served jeon are seafood (because Korea is a peninsula) and kimchi (a food considered essential to every Korean meal). Jeon is both an everyday and a celebratory food in Korean culture. How to order: Call 21 or visit for takeout orders pickup and delivery via UberEats, DoorDash, Caviar, GrubHub, Seamless. In Korea, the type of soup eaten varies by family and region, so you’ll be able to satisfy your craving no matter which tradition you follow (or want to start!). The restaurant offers all three soups typical of Seollal celebrations: tteokguk (rice cake soup), manduguk (dumpling soup), and tteok manduguk (rice cake and dumpling soup). When served in tteokguk, their chewy rice cakes are hand-cut into the traditional coin shape, which is associated with prosperity. MDK Noodles makes their noodles, rice cakes, and dumplings from scratch every morning, ensuring excellent texture and unmatched freshness. According to a Korean superstition, eating more tteokguk during Seollal will bring abundance and good luck, as well as add another year to one’s life. Tteok mandu guk | Photo courtesy of MDK NoodlesĪsk any Korean what makes Seollal “Seollal”, and the first words out of their mouth will be, “tteokguk.” A rice cake soup, tteokguk is to Seollal as turkey is to Thanksgiving. Here are six traditional Korean Lunar New Year dishes to try this week and beyond: The surest way to fall in love with a culture’s traditions is to share in their holidays, so this year I set out to make the most of my Seollal celebrations, learning which dishes are most significant to the holiday and where to find their best versions in Koreatown. Here, I can sample the tastes of my motherland-her flavors, customs, and language-and feel a bit closer to my Korean heritage. The greater LA area is home to the largest Korean population outside of Korea, so, for me, living here feels like the next best thing to moving across the world. Many Korean Americans will spend the holiday working, especially those who work in the restaurant industry and are hoping to fulfill large, holiday orders.Īs a resident of LA’s Koreatown for nearly three years, I’m lucky to live in an area where being Korean feels ordinary or, sometimes, even fun. The lunar holiday will largely be celebrated within households or over Zoom or KakaoTalk, a South Korean messaging app. Much like 2020’s Christmas, Halloween, and Independence Day, Seollal’s long-awaited, perfectly timed holiday weekend has been thwarted by the pandemic. Here in the US, absent federal days off, Koreans and Korean Americans fit their celebrations in however they can: feasting on delicious food, making offerings to ancestors, spending time with extended family, and generously exchanging gifts, especially expensive fruits, all to welcome a new and hopefully prosperous year. In Korea, Seollal is a national holiday lasting three days, with most Koreans given time off work so that they can gather with family. Seollal is celebrated on the second new moon after the winter solstice, this year falling on February 12. Decades later, only a few memories stand out: playing yutnori, a game that involved painted sticks wearing hanbok, a traditional Korean dress and, most memorably, bowing to elders in exchange for money, or sebae. As a Korean-American adoptee raised by a white family in the Midwest, my Korean holiday celebrations were limited to annual Korean heritage events for Korean-American adoptees. Until recently, my understanding of Seollal, or Korean Lunar New Year, was limited to the more popular Chinese Lunar New Year traditions.
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