Los Angeles: Babimbop in Koreatown

Gene and I are meeting his cousin Bill and Bill’s girlfriend Aura in Koreatown for dinner. The restaurant is seven miles away and we decide to take a taxi so we can enjoy drinks with dinner.

The Beverly Hills Cab Co. taxi waits outside our hotel behind a long, gray limo intended for the couple we shared the elevator with. The blonde girl spoke of the scenes she has to shoot tomorrow and I wonder if she is a big actress. In Los Angeles, anyone or everyone may be an actor or star.

As we ride out to Koreatown, we pass “malls” look like office buildings, reminiscent of many buildings we saw in South Korea. Each mall level has signs all around the perimeter of the building, but no display windows.

We meet Bill and Aura at the Beverly Soon Tofu House, decorated in Korean-rustic. They are waiting for us with a spread of side dishes on the table. Aura offers us some of her jug of Barley Tea. I order two Sojus, but I forgot that Soju is the strong vodka-like drink and not the semi-sweet wine drink I thought it was. “(Bek se ju” is the Korean wine drink that I couldn’t think of.)

Aura asks me if I like Babimbop, and I think it is the dumplings we got at the little Korean storefront in Changwon. Turns out, Babimbop is a big bowl of salad fixings with a fried egg on top. I copy Aura as she adds a sweet red sauce, rice and soy sauce to the salad and tosses it up with her chopsticks. We also get a bubbling soup in which the waitress cracks a raw egg, one-handed. We ordered it medium-spicy, but it is still too spicy for our taste.

Gene and Bill spend the dinner riffing from topic to topic, making segues that only make sense to them, but they are having so much fun, it is great to watch.