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Her chain expanded to include more than a dozen locations, including restaurants in Dallas and New York's Koreatown. The house specialty, soondubu-jjigae, was made from her own secret recipe. Her first restaurant opened in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles in April 1996. She was founder of the popular BCD Tofu House chain of Korean restaurants, named for the Buk Chang Dong neighborhood of Seoul, where her husband's mother had a restaurant. Lee moved to the United States in 1989, with her husband and children. Before It Eats Itself,” runs every other Thursday.A BCD Tofu House location in Irvine, California. At least once a semester, usually more, I find myself sitting in front of a table of banchan, waiting for my stew, tired but happy all the same.Ĭhristina Tiber is a senior writing about food. Though my fragile budget and class-littered schedule doesn’t always permit a food-centric lifestyle, BCD Tofu House is a cheap, delicious 1 a.m. With two locations mere feet apart, BCD has successfully conquered the Koreatown late-night food scene. Combined with the banchan, BCD Tofu House is a perfect mix between drunk food and health food, satisfying and colorful enough to please even the most inebriated. The soondubu itself is hot and satisfying, with smooth pieces of soft tofu mixed with kimchi, sometimes with protein or vegetables, always boiling hot and served with fluffy rice.

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Will you crack the uncooked egg into your boiling pot of soondubu and watch it cook as the soup cools? Will you crack it into hot rice and mix the stew in with it? Will you break up bites of hot broth and kimchi with pickles or fish cakes? Will you finish your meal with the rice porridge made out of the stone pot your rice was served in?īCD Tofu House offers no answers to these questions but simply presents them as options. In a way, the whole fried fish represents much of the experience at BCD Tofu House. When inebriated, the fried fish is both a challenge and a reward: Eat the head? Just the tender flesh? Try to eat the eyeball? Some customers will eat the entire fish, the bones a mere obstacle, without a moment of hesitation. Newcomers, especially those new to Korean food, may gasp when a waitress places a whole fried fish in front of each person, bones and all.

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Here, they are served first with plates full of banchan, small side dishes, like fish cakes, pickles and kimchi. After a concert at the nearby Wiltern, or a big party night, crowds will file in after everything else has closed. Somehow, at all hours of the day, it’s busy. Koreatown has not one but two locations of the popular chain BCD Tofu House, which primarily serves stone pots full of soondubu as well as other Korean classics like bibimbap and bulgogi. In many ways, Koreatown feels like a daring rebel against the sleeping city.Īnd, while I’ll never turn down an opportunity to sit around a hot grill with mountains of bulgogi and galbi, I am more often sitting in front of a bubbling pot of soondubu jjigae, or kimchi and tofu stew, at a tofu house. Karaoke bars and nightclubs flood with soju, snacks and drunk patrons, all eager to extend the night until the early morning. Korean barbecue joints are more full at 1 a.m. At some point - maybe due to its culture, maybe due to its location - Koreatown has become a premier late-night food spot. In my pursuit of midnight meals, I have found myself in one part of the city over and over again: Koreatown. Some of the best food is delegated to the nightcrawlers, the college students, the graveyard shift workers - all hiding under the guise of a 2 a.m.

Instead, I gravitate toward the late-night diners, the taco trucks, the street hot dogs consumed past midnight in a glittery, uninhabited city.

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on a Saturday, and my low-lit dinners are bowls of mac and cheese eaten in the blue glow of my laptop. My weekend brunches are leftover slices of pizza eaten at 2 p.m. While I love a lavish weekend brunch at Sqirl or Gjusta, or a low-lit dinner at Bavel or Majordomo, I frankly do not have the budget or the time to pursue L.A.’s upper-crust cuisine. BCD Tofu House, located in Koreatown, serves up tasty Korean cuisine classics such as bulogi, bibimbap and beef tofu soup (above).