Koreatown Restaurants

Real deal Korean food, featuring bossam, flavorful meat-of-your-choice, wrapped in leafy vegetables. Great pa jun (Korean seafood pancakes), pork bassam and loads of pickled, marinated this n' that. Loud and crowded; Koreatown restaurants don't get more authentic than Kobawoo.

Tongue-numbingly spicy and addictive Korean fried chicken. Crunchy soy, garlic/honey batter coating the best damn chicken wings you ever had. We're not necessarily wing nuts, but at Kyochon, we come close.

Sizzling, grill-your-own Korean barbecue. Varied cuts of beef, including tripe and tongue, plus marinated pork, ready-sliced for grilling and dipping into Park's spicy sauces. They offer soups and stews as well, including beef short rib soup, slow cooked with ginseng. Go local and sample Chamisul or Sansachun (Korean liquors; remember, you don't have to drive). Diners in the know consider Park's the barbecue king of Koreatown restaurants. www.parksbbq.com

Koreatown restaurants offer a lot more than barbecue and kimchee. We're going to flatly declare this the best rotisserie chicken in the world. Juicy and succulent, it pulls its flavor from the oak-fire grill and only gets better when you dip it in aji sauce, a killer green concoction whose origins perhaps only the Incas know. The best deal is a half chicken with fries or rice and beans. They've got anticuchos (beef heart) too, for the organ fans among you. (They're just across the street from Korean Discount Underwear, if you want to combine a little shopping with your meal.)

Red leather booths, a perfectly grilled steak, iceberg lettuce salads and a bar that only time and a million elbows lifted in toasts by reporters and cops and lawyers and lounge singers could burnish to such a world-weary sheen. www.taylorssteakhouse.com