Restaurant: Da Jeong
Location: 3909 1/2 W Olympic Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90019. (323) 931-8900
Date: March 14, 2016
Cuisine: Korean
Rating: Great homestyle Korean
Los Angeles is blessed with a huge Korea Town and an extensive library of Korean food.
Da Jeong is a home style place that’s famous (at least among my friends) for its Korean fried chicken. But somehow I’d never tried it.
Pretty much beer friendly food.
Like any good Korean place, Da Jeong comes with an array of banchan (small usually pickled dishes). This one was a spiced pickled cucumber.
Kimchee, the classic.
Greens and onions.
Bean sprouts.
Chewy radish and peppers, vaguely chewy and quite tasty.
Little “candied” fish. Sweet, spicy, and briney.
Seafood pancake. This omelet/pancake is served with a soy sauce-like sauce. It was full of green onions and all sorts of seafood goodness. Really quite excellent.
Soy sauce shrimp. Raw or marinated prawns soaked in soy sauce. You twist off the head and chomp. As we noted, this was an “advanced” dish. Not so hardcore as the raw crab, but hardcore enough.
Fried chicken. Had to get this of course. Very crispy, with a strong Asian salt and pepper in the batter. We found it a touch mysterious which part of the chicken we were getting under all that fry, and the cuts are different than classic American breast and thigh. I’m guessing it was mostly dark meat. It was pretty darn awesome though.
Hearty Korean Spicy Beef Stew. That standard red Korean sauce with beef and cabbage and green onions and other stuff. Certainly a hearty hot stew.
Purple rice (rice with a bit of red bean).
I have to come back here with the Hedonists and a bigger gang and/or someone Korean. Food was very good and I could tell the ingredients were super fresh and the execution excellent. I don’t really know enough yet about Korean food to know how to order well, and with just the two of us we only got to try a few things — plus with portion sizes as they were we had WAY too much food.