MEET US IN K-TOWN

Koreatown is the beating heart of Los Angeles—a neighbourhood alive with authentic food, contemporary culture, and a diverse, fiercely devoted community.

- Steph Cha

LATE ONE NIGHT IN November 2008, I stood outside Le Cercle, a club on Western Avenue in LA’s Koreatown. Next to me was a man I’d never met before, eating a burrito that smelled like heaven. I was 22 and imperiously drunk, and when I asked for a bite, he was too startled to say no. It turned out one bite was not enough, so I dragged my girlfriends to the taco truck parked in the Sizzler lot across the street. There we met the truck’s owner—a man we later learned was named Roy Choi. He was taking his new Kogi BBQ truck on its first weekend tour of Los Angeles.

Gone now: Le Cercle, my 20s, sharing food with strangers, the Sizzler. Here to stay: Korean tacos, the exuberance of youth, and the wonder of discovery in Koreatown, where change is rapid, exciting, heartbreaking, and constant.

Koreatown received official recognition from Los Angeles County in 1980, thanks in large part to the efforts of Hi Duk Lee. Lee was an entrepreneur and community leader who established the neighbourhood as a “Second Seoul” for the wave of Koreans who moved to LA after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which lifted the restrictive quota system based on national origin. Lee opened a cluster of businesses around Olympic Boulevard and Normandie Avenue in the 1970s—including VIP Palace, one of the first Korean restaurants in town. He had it built in a traditional architectural style, with imported blue tiles. The restaurant became a neighbourhood staple, a buffet my parents used to frequent before my siblings and I came along. It’s where Pulitzer Prize–winning food critic Jonathan Gold—who made the fortunes of many Korean restaurateurs before his death in 2018— got his introduction to our heat-packed cuisine.