K Soul Food

The Source in Buena Park has an impressively large collection of traditional Korean dining experiences, most amazingly K Soul Food, which you mightn’t guess from the name is a seafood restaurant with live octopus, live shrimp, live sea urchin, and other items on the menu. You could order Korean-style sushi, kimbap, or naengmyun noodles – and get banchan and some very nice, piping hot soup included with them at no extra charge – but when you walk in and see tanks containing the more exotic offerings, the point is clear: come here for what’s special. (Note: K Soul Food’s newer and smaller South Coast Plaza location has a comparatively stripped-down menu, with no live seafood tanks.)

Some of the live seafood delights enable you to try a partially de-shelled, translucent raw shrimp with caviar, a freshly opened half globe of sea urchin, and still wriggling octopus. The octopus isn’t served whole (a la the movie Oldboy), but rather cut into dozens of pieces that are still squirming due solely to residual nerve pulses, leading to an eating experience unlike any other – a fun test of chopstick proficiency. By comparison, we’ve had mixed experiences with the live sea urchin, which in two cases was perfectly fresh, and on another visit looked and tasted at least hours old.