Lee Ga Korean Restaurant – LA

Naengmyeon – a Korean cold noodle dish typically made with thin buckwheat noodles in either a North Korean-style beef broth (Mul) or South Korean-style spicy sauce (Bibim) – is enough of a long-term favorite of ours that we’ve gone out of our way to try versions that are claimed to be special. At Lee Ga, a relatively young Korean restaurant in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, the naengmyeon is atypically handmade on premises using a special imported machine, eliminating the typical need to reconstitute dried noodles, which depending on where you order them, could render them a bit too chewy or soft for some discerning customers.

Should you visit Lee Ga, our advice would be to focus less on the modestly differentiated middle-of-the-road texture of the angel hair-thin noodles and more on the ways they can be ordered. In addition to the Mul and Bibim preparations, you can find an “extreme spicy sauce” version called Maeun Bul, a version with warm rather than cold beef broth (On Myun), and regular spicy versions that include raw fish (Hwe), beef and raw fish (Sae Ki Mi), and beef, raw fish, and vegetables (Jengban). Lee Ga also specializes in beef and pork ribs, the former available in affordable combination sets with your choice of four naengmyeons, or as $46-70 platters with your choice of meat and spices.

After waiting outside for a table to open up – expect a line during normal meal times – we tried three of the homemade naengmyeon dishes and the beef ribs, passing on an appetizer of spicy skate sashimi only because our server warned us that many guests left it unfinished. Our meal included only three decent banchan side dishes (kimchi, plain cabbage, and sweet radishes), and our noodle bowls were more noteworthy for their size than their flavors.