Gold Dig #59

Kobawoo House is one of the many Koreatown restaurants on Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list. It is super helpful to refer to his list when deciding where to eat in this area… there are so many restaurants that it’s hard to know where to begin or imagine that you’d ever be able to sort through them all. As with most of them, Kobawoo House is an unassuming spot in a strip mall with a too-small valet-only parking lot. There’s nothing about it to make it stand out from the multitude of seemingly similar K-town eateries… until you try the food!

The Dish

Kobawoo House is renowned for its bosam – super tender boiled pork belly, which you wrap in pickled cabbage and top with side dishes. Go for the lunch special during the week if you can – it’s an amazing deal at $11.99 for a generous platter of bosam, plus a big bowl of miso stew!

Banchan

Kobawoo House will not overwhelm you with dish after dish of banchan like some of the places in Koreatown. At lunch we got only four different banchan dishes, but they were very well done. They are definitely going for quality over quantity. I particularly liked the potato and jalapeno dish, which was especially a surprise given my lack of fondness for potatoes generally. You also got to choose between white rice and purple rice – we got one of each.

Bosam

You will see at least one order of bosam at every table in the place. The incredibly tender and flavorful pork belly slices are served with pickled Napa cabbage and radish slices to wrap the pork. There are sides of radish kimchi, pickled jalapeños, and salted seafood to top your cabbage wraps. So good, and fun to eat!

Miso Stew

The bosam lunch special comes with a good-sized bowl of miso stew. I was expecting this to be something of a throw-away side, like the tiny bowls of miso soup you get in many Japanese restaurants that are just a few gulps of broth with a couple cubes of tofu. But this turned out to be a hearty stew full of flavor, with a nice amount of mushrooms and tofu, that I kept going back to for more.

Bulgogi

We also got the bulgogi lunch special. This was a solid version of the thinly sliced grilled marinated beef that I always enjoy. It came with lettuce leaves and fermented bean paste so that you could make lettuce wraps if you wanted, but I preferred to just eat the bulgogi with the rice.

Kimchi Stew

The bulgogi lunch special also included kimchi stew. Like the miso stew, this was not just a side soup. It could have stood as a main dish in its own right, with chunks of pork and vegetables floating in a rich spicy broth.