The black rice at Slowfish isn’t just a gimmick–it’s an essential component of the restaurant’s subscription to the Slow Food movement. More important, though, is the black rice’s taste, which conceals a few nutty notes that pair perfectly with the restaurant’s sushi bar. Among Slowfish’s so-called big plates, the beef ribs easily eat best. The [...]

Kalguksu is the restaurant’s staple, a dish truly meant for all seasons—one that can warm you up in the winter and also take you to the sea in the summer. That’s because kalguksu is a noodle soup scooped up from the ocean, with fat, hand-cut noodles swaying like kelp among the soup’s seafood. Swimming through [...]

Slowfish comes wrapped in black

PHOTO by RICK POON
Slowfish seems a negative space, one where all the usual sushi-house whites are underexposed into medium grays and endless blacks. The restaurant embraces this, though, as you can’t even see into the place—the windows are blacked out by a limousine-level tinting so dark that you can’t spot a [...]

Kyochon Chicken is yet another link in the local food-court chain, a Korean chicken stand that continues the tradition built up in places like Marukai and Mitsuwa. Kyochon’s host, however, is Freshia, a still-new market at the most outer edge of Garden Grove’s Little Seoul (the market technically sits in Stanton). Like Pinkberry before it, [...]

Food for all times at Hangari Noodle House

PHOTO by RICK POON
It’s just a piece of paper, a postcard-sized slip shoved into a block of display-grade plastic. It’s only 13 items long, too, the entire kitchen contained in this single tableside sheet. But it’s those few lines of Korean that make up the menu at Hangari [...]

A.R. Supermarket
Whether you’re hungry or not, shopping at A.R. Supermarket will chew up at least an hour of your time. But that’s part of the market’s strategy. If A.R. actually meant for its customers to make it out in less than an hour, it wouldn’t force them to pass by jewelry displays, a shoe store [...]

Cho Dang specializes in only one dish of the Korean canon: tofu stew. Sundubu jjigae, as it’s known, is a fiery soup that comes in a lot varieties—beef, oyster, and mushroom, among others. But all of the varieties are based around the same central ingredient: soft, silky tofu. Whatever variety you choose, the stew will [...]

Cho Dang’s tofu stews still delight

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
There are a lot of reasons why tofu has long been lost in translation, but most of the apprehension towards it probably comes from the very concept of the food: wobbly little blocks of unappetizing, coagulated soy milk. It doesn’t help that the resulting soy curds also [...]