A Mung Friend

Forget kimchi , forget barbecued short ribs. The Korean dish that all of us are looking for is the true mung-bean pancake, a crisp, golden creature that is flavored with shreds of leek.

There are many ways to eat a mung bean, but only a couple that actually taste good. Even Louis Nye, Nendle Nosher on the old Steve Allen show, is a fan of the mung-bean pancake, although you might expect him to be more of a latke man.

Across the street from the bar One for the Road, down the block from the disco Club Tomorrow, in the former location of a restaurant once known citywide for Japanese pizza and loud reggae music, Kobawoo House is an archetypal Korean greasy spoon. It’s the kind of restaurant Korean friends will try to steer you away from, then admit that they sort of like themselves--sort of the way people who nosh at Canter’s twice a week still tend to warn you off the place. (You wouldn’t want to eat off the floor.) It’s a stripped-down cafe, with dad’s-den paneling on the walls, worn tables, the pungent smack of kimchi and cardboard signs strewn about that advertise Korean rice wine. Kobawoo House is widely reputed to serve the best mung-bean pancake in town.

As soon as you wander into Kobawoo House, you are led to a table and set up with cold barley tea and three kinds of kimchi : a crunchy radish pickle; a tart, fiery-red cabbage pickle; a little bowlful of crisp water kimchi that is powerfully flavored with garlic. You’ll find the small menu on a card in one of those plastic holders on the table, printed in English on one side, in Hangul on the flip, though about a third of the dishes on the Korean side of the menu are untranslated (this can be distressing when you see an intriguing but unlisted dish fly by). The waitresses are unused to non-Korean customers, but try to be as helpful as they can. Nobody will talk you out of ordering squiggly piles of steamed pig’s feet if that is what you really want to eat.

Here they come, Kobawoo’s thick mung-bean pancakes, two to an order and fragrant with the greasy tang of the griddle, brown at the edges, dotted with little nubs of pink meat. Beneath their thin veneer of crunch, the pancakes seem almost ethereal, melting away almost instantly in the mouth like an intriguingly flavored polenta. A soy-citrus dip cuts through the richness of the dish. A waitress, watching you struggle to tear the pancake apart with your chopsticks, hurries over with a pair of sewing scissors, with which she snips the pancake into bite-size pieces. Over in a corner of the open kitchen, a woman stirs an enormous batch of mung beans that cook in a giant wok.

There are the usual barbecued short ribs and flank steak; bubbling iron cauldrons of bean curd cooked with kimchi ; thin omelets stuffed with different types of marine life, most of which seems to be crab with a “K”--seafood “pancakes.” There is an intriguing dish of warm tofu cubes, sprinkled with sesame seeds and a Chinese-style chopped pickle, that you eat with the hot cabbage kimchi that is served on the side. Kimchi -fried rice is really good, another one of those cauldron things--it looks as if it’s filled with white rice, but turns out to conceal a seething core of fermented-cabbage stew.

The Cornish-hen soup is especially delicious, with the intense broth that only comes with cooking a lot of bird in a very little water, flavored strongly with a huge knob of ginger and at least a dozen cloves of garlic, mellowed out with a handful of rice, concealing a whole, tender hen. The soup comes unsalted--you toss in a spoonful studded with sesame seeds, and also a blizzard of chopped scallion top. It is among the best chicken soups in Los Angeles, tastier than any delicatessen’s--and just the thing to eat with a mung-bean pancake.

Kobawoo House

4271 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 660-6271. Open daily, 10 a.m. to midnight. Beer and wine. Take-out. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$18.