Soban Restaurant - Koreatown, Los Angeles, CA

I generally don’t care about any sort of stinky ethnic food that might show up at Scoops Westside. I remember my dad telling me early on that it’s not nice to have that kind of atmosphere at an ice cream shop. I stopped caring about, oh maybe week two, when my friends realized Chego (with all of its olfactory-busting aroma), was a block up Overland Avenue. One of the more interesting meals that someone’s brought to Scoops was a gae jang, or raw spicy crab, from a restaurant in Koreatown named Soban, which features a slew of seafood dishes as well as a signature spicy braised short rib dish (mae moon kalbi chim).

Daniel Dy, a talented photographer and food writer of his own right (effingdericious.wordpress.com), brought over a serving of spicy raw crab from Soban one sunny Saturday afternoon, filling the ice cream shop with its distinctively Korean aromas. Just from the banchan alone, I could tell that this restaurant was serious about serving some pristine seafood. We scheduled a dinner a week later with a large crew, the better to taste through the menu.

Soban sits near the southwest edge of Koreatown, across from the newly celebrated Sun Ha Jang, an emporium of fatty grilled duck meat, and just a block off of Kang Nam, an old-school restaurants that’s known for bigtime classic dishes, such as their kalbi chim. The ambiance inside Soban is clean and modern, with a counter that was probably once a sushi bar. Sadly, they have no beer or wine license, so you have cold water and warm barley tea as beverage selections. I’m not sure whether they allow one to bring in bottles of beer or wine, but I’d take a chance and bring some in event that they do.

If you look Korean (and all of us at the table did), then they’ll offer you a half English-Korean menu and a full Korean menu, but actually there’s very little deviation between the two in choices (I turned out to be the only Korean at the table). The dishes come out with very little interval, so just be ready to make room on the table (and in your belly).


A bit on Korean raw crab (gae jang). You’re most likely to encounter it first at a place like BCD Tofu House, where they’ll occasionally offer it as a free banchan, but most of the time you’re getting a very small blue crab. It’s no slouch, you can suckle upon the small legs and body and slurp out tender crab meat in a way that you’ve probably never tasted. I remember getting some during an epic seafood meal in Busan, where they slice up tank-fresh fish a la minute and spread out a gorgeous table, with a few of the Pacific Ocean for as far as the eye could see, and there alongside the sliced sashimi were a few pieces of gae jang, as both a textural contrast and an earmark for the shellfish genre. Soban’s two examples might be some of the best in Koreatown if only because of their nature: instead of the more common blue crab, you get the very expensive flower crab that’s more commonly found at places like Ondal 2 (or presumely Ondal 1 though no one seem to mention that place, ever).

Flower crab is a species more typical in the Indian Ocean or eastern Pacific, and must be invariably flown into the U.S., thereby justifying the nearly $30 price tag for each gae jang dish at Soban. The meat is slightly heftier than Chesapeake blue crabmeat, yielding more flesh per creature, with the natural sweetness endemic to any small crab species. It’s worth the price of entry if you’re going to be sharing – at least three people, possibly four, could get a decent taste of Soban’s more distinctive soy sauce based or the more typical red pepper spice-based. I had to mentally temper the highly salted soy sauce version that we got during this meal, though it allowed the flavor of the crabmeat to come through better than the red pepper sauce. The best way to eat the oddly shaped pieces are to suck out the meat with loud slurps. Liken the experience to eating a terrific bowl of ramen, without shame and perhaps with a bit of gusto.

What’s equally impressive at Soban is the array of excellent fish they serve, both pan-fried and via joorim, which is a slight braise in a sweet-spicy soy-red pepper paste (sweeter than the paste that goes with the red pepper sauce gae jang) that goes very well with more substantially fleshed fish, such as black cod or mackerel. We got the goh dong oh joorim, which isn’t as luxurious as black cod (eun dae goo) that you’ll find at myriad shops all over Koreatown, but the denser and oilier flesh holds up well. I made sure that our table got to try one of my favorite pan-fried fish, the ee myun soo gui, which is always sliced so that both sides of the flesh are flat. I found Soban’s to be a tad heavy on the salt, but it didn’t seem to bother others at the table.

And finally the spicy short ribs, which are braised to a tender perfection. The dish is expensive and luxuriant with a syrupy red sauce that’s more decadent than a boeuf bourguignon. It might actually be the real surprise at a seafood-oriented place like Soban. Order it for those who are too feeble to suck on raw crab or chopstick their way through whole fish (head and all). A bowl of brown rice, chock full of comforting gingko nuts, couldn’t ask for a better companion.

Soban Restaurant
4001 W. Olympic Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90019
(323) 936-9106

Note: "soban" refers to the traditional low-lying table common in Korean households, where the family sits around sitting on the floor.