(classical music)
- Andrew, we're back at Chosun Galbee
- [Andrew] Where we were
in our season one Korean barbecue episode.
- [Steven] Lots of fans said that that episode
actually lead them to try Korean BBQ
for the very first time.
So we thought, why not introduce more people
to more types of Korean cuisine?
- We're really lucky in Los Angeles
to have a ton of amazing Korean food.
- So to take it up a notch,
- Tomorrow, first thing.
- Korean soups.
Today on Worth It,
we're gonna be trying three different soups
at three drastically different price points
to find out which soup was the most worth it at its price.
- The food I never thought we would get to do on Worth It.
- We are on our way right now to one of my favorite,
if not my favorite restaurant in Los Angeles.
It is called Hanbat Shul-Lung-Tung
and they specialize in one product,
and that is sul lung tang.
Ox bone Korean soup with a very beefy, delectable taste.
We're gonna speak with Jong
about how they make their soup.
Just to show you how much I love sul lung tang,
I actually have an entire album in my phone
dedicated to sul lung tang.
- Okay. - Do you wanna see it?
- [Andrew] Ooh, wow.
They look exactly-- - The same. (laughs)
- [Andrew] This is also fun
'cause I can see your skill in photography improving.
- Also, we're gonna be meeting one of my best friends,
Megan Lee there.
She is an actor, singer-songwriter.
She actually grew up eating at this restaurant.
In fact, one of my first times there was with her.
So it's the circle of life.
She's actually your soup grandmother,
if you think about it that way.
- Whoa!
Yeah.
Does that make you my soup daddy?
(laughing) No (laughing)
- Hanbat is my favorite restaurant in LA.
How did Hanbat get started?
(speaking in Korean)
- So, sul lung tang is
ox bone broth soup. - Yes.
(Jong speaking in Korean)
- [Steven] Hanbat only serves one dish.
- One dish.
- [Steven] Sul lung tang. - That's it.
- [Steven] Why do you wanna just serve one thing?
(Jong speaking in Korean)
(ka-ching)
This is Megan Lee.
- Hi guys.
- I will order the mixed.
- I'm gonna get the brisket.
- You should do Jong's favorite, which is the flank.
- [Andrew] That's exactly what I wanna go with.
- [Steven] Okay, let's do it! (Megan laughing)
- [Andrew] And you also get complimentary barley tea.
- Cheers.
Thank you.
- [Megan] The rice.
- [Steven] Oh, it's so fast.
Hanbat is your spot.
- Yes.
Me and my family used to come here all the time.
So crazy now that we're filming here.
- Mixed.
- Mixed is for me, thank you. - Yasss.
It smells so good.
When it comes to Korean food,
the stinker it is, the more delicious it is
and richer it is. (laughs)
- Mm, we forgot to cheers.
- Oh!
(laughing) - It's okay.
- For such a simple recipe,
- Yum. - It has this
insane depth of flavor that I can't explain.
- It's beefy in a way that steak can't be beefy.
The flavor that's locked in the bones and cartilage
that's not in
straight meat cuts. - That's true.
Wow, you guys are professionals at this.
- Dude.
- Yeah, so we have all of these garnishes.
What should I be doing here?
- I love adding pepper.
- How much is enough green onion?
- Yo, I add a lot.
(laughing)
I like my green onion.
- [Steven] Mm.
- We have two different kinds of kimchi.
This is just regular cabbage kimchi.
But this is a radish kimchi.
I personally think the radish kimchi is the best.
(speaking in Korean)
- [Andrew] Oh, the radish is great.
- Aw man, eating it after I have hot soup.
- I think pickle and meat is the greatest partnership
in all of food.
- Pickle and meat.
Are you the meat and you're the pickle?
- He's definitely the pickle.
- I am what happens when you combine pickle and meat.
(laughing) - Ooh.
What I like to do is actually get
a little bit of the sauce here and you kinda pour it
into the soup. - Oh, really?
- You do that halfway through your soup.
- Mhm.
Kind of changing it up as you go.
Liquid cheers.
- Mm.
Come on.
- Good, right?
- We're gonna be having our next soup a little bit later on.
But first we're gonna stop for
what I think is one of the coolest places
in all of Los Angeles.
It's called Baroo.
So we're gonna be having some kombucha and some cookies.
- I'm Mina, I'm one of the owners.
Baroo is the Korean word for
the bowl that Buddhist monks carry.
The food is steeped in Korean ingredients,
but it's a very diverse menu.
We ferment our own drinks here.
This is a tepache, fermented pineapples.
And today we have lemon verbana yuzu kombucha.
The sonoko cookie, and then we have our everything mochi,
which is kind of our signature sweet.
- Oh.
Cheers.
Whoa whoa whoa, yeah. (laughing)
- Whoa. - Ah!
- Tastes like pineapple cider.
Mm.
Oh my god.
- This is almost lowkey bread.
- Soup fact.
(cymbals)
- In 2012, the late Jonathan Gold
published his article on the 60 Korean dishes
every Angeleno should know.
He lists numerous soups which include
blowfish soup, gamjatang, cheonggukjang,
samgyetang, dongchimi gook soo, silkworm soup,
seolleongtang.
- My head is spinning with soups.
- This is what Korea did.
"What is that?
"Can you eat it?
"We'll make it a soup."
(laughing)
"Next."
- We're now on our way to
honestly one of my favorite restaurants,
called Spoon by H.
Yoon is going to show us her pork belly dumpling soup.
This is actually a dessert cafe.
So I know we just had a cookie,
but we're also gonna be having some dessert there.
(jazz music)
(speaking in Korean)
- Why did you put this soup on the menu,
when you really are trying to make
really delicious desserts?
- We started out as a dessert cafe and then
the regular keep asking me,
"Can you make this, can you make that?"
- And you were just like, "Sure."
- Yeah, because we are really small,
like tiny humble cafe, so it feels like
second home, maybe?
- So today we're trying your pork belly dumpling soup.
(Yoon speaking in Korean)
So how is your mandukguk different from
others that you might find?
- Traditional way is anchovy, so it look a little clearer.
We mix all together ox tails, pork bone, beef bone.
(speaking in Korean)
It takes like forever.
(speaking in Korean)
(ka-ching)
- So we've both actually had this soup before.
It's so good, we had to have it again on the show.
- It made my glasses steamy.
Dumpling.
- That's a good-looking dumpling.
(slurping)
(coughing)
It's full of flavor, Steven. - Ooh.
It's so rich.
- One of the things I love is the size of the dumpling
relative to the bowl that you eat out of.
- Check out the pleats.
You can tell that it was made with love.
- It's pleating me to eat it.
(laughing)
(exhales)
- Okay. - It's so tasty.
For me, this definitely falls into a category of
you could eat it every day.
It's so encouraging to eat.
- Food encouraging. - It's like rah-ing you on
as you're eating. (laughing)
It's like, "Yes!
"Eat me!" - "Go!"
You know what they say to encourage people in Korean?
- What's that?
- Fighting!
You can do it!
Keep it going! - Oh yeah.
- [Annie] Hwaiting.
- Annie's saying it in the right way.
- [Annie] Hwaiting.
- [Steven] Hwaiting.
- We're at a dessert cafe,
we should have some desserts as well.
- Yeah. - Yes.
(Yoon speaking in Korean)
- [Yoon] It's like a flower bouquet.
- [Andrew] Of grapes.
- [Yoon] Yeah, yeah. (Andrew laughing)
(Yoon speaking in Korean)
Little bit of Nutella drizzle,
and then a house-made ice-cream.
- [Andrew] You guys make your own ice-cream too?
- [Yoon] Yeah. - [Andrew] Oh wow.
(Yoon speaking in Korean)
- Are you serious?
This is ridiculous, right? - This is the
perfect example of the attention to detail.
One whole grape, tiny slice put into it,
tiny sheet of paper inserted into that.
- Oh my gosh.
- The whipped cream dissipated
and it's still being held in place like a stone arch.
This is some Da Vinci shit.
You can't eat this.
It's frustrating.
- [Steven] Oh yeah.
Whoa, wait.
- This is not your typical waffle.
- What?
This is my first time having this actually.
- Really? - Yeah.
Dude.
It is somehow fluffy and crispy.
- Yeah.
It feels like something that a spider would make.
- Oh!
Yeah. - Do you know what I mean?
Spider, you think crawly bugs.
But then you see its web and you're like
how could nature produce such a perfect shape?
Someone check Yoon for a radioactive spider bite.
(laughing)
- Peter Parker,
more like something that I don't know.
Spooner Man.
(laughing)
Sorry.
- This wins.
- [Steven] It's not in the game,
'cause it's a soup episode.
- This is the best soup.
(Steven laughing)
- I love how it is just a family
doing their thing, killing it.
But, it does mean that sometimes
it takes a little bit more time,
'cause there's all this love put into the food.
- So if you wanna check out Spoon by H,
please go with a little bit of patience.
Soup fact.
(cymbals)
- [Annie] Haejangguk literally means hangover soup
and it is a rich, beefy bone broth dish
that can be served at any time of day.
- Annie, didn't you say that your mom
used to make you that soup all the time?
- Yes.
- Were you just constantly (laughing)
hungover?
- What's going on?
- I was not a drunk baby.
- Now we are on our way to our last restaurant.
- We're gonna see David Chang at Majordomo.
He is going to show us their whole boiled chicken
multi-course soup dish.
Because he's a friend of the show,
he's gonna be joining us for our meal.
Also because it's quite a large meal.
This is a multi-course soup extravaganza.
- Call him by his real name, Davy boo.
- I will not.
- Okay.
- Uh (laughing)
- You're unhinged!
- [Steven] Just wanna acknowledge here we are again,
you are a friend of the show,
we've worked with you,
- [David] Yes.
- But, you opened this restaurant
in the time that we last
saw you on the show. - Oh my god,
I totally forgot about that!
That's wild.
When we opened up this restaurant,
it was very important to me that we represented
the diversity of Los Angeles without it being patronizing.
I know Koreatown very well.
But I don't wanna do anything that was like
well, come here to eat Korean food.
And I looked at it as almost like a venn diagram
and we needed to find that overlap.
- So does that occur in this dish itself?
- Yes.
The chicken that we boil, we serve it two different ways.
Just a poached chicken breast,
and then we pick the dark meat and serve that as a soup
that comes after the white meat.
Judde Parra-Sickles is the executive chef.
Jude's gonna be cooking the food today.
I wanted to serve something that's boiled
because I grew up eating boiled chicken.
I have to figure out how to present a dish
that is interesting and cool,
'cause it's not what people expect chicken to be.
So I kept on thinking
the image was a truss roast chicken, right?
It's beautiful, golden brown,
and it's probably presented in a giant copper pot,
and I'm like I should just serve it like that, but boiled.
When we first did the dish,
the biggest complaint that we had is it takes too long.
So we're like okay, I'm just gonna show 'em the chicken.
(laughing)
(slow jazz music)
Pick the meat and then if we put all the chicken meat in,
it's too much chicken meat.
If I just put the dark meat in, I now have this white meat.
Is there another poached chicken that I like a lot?
It was like, of course!
I love Hainanese chicken.
- [Andrew] For somebody who has no idea what
Hainanese chicken is, what is that?
- How would you define it?
- Just a poached chicken and then served over chicken rice
that's cooked in chicken stock.
Popular in Singapore and Malaysia.
- [David] It's crazy how good it is.
It's always dependable,
and there is another dish by Gabriela Camara
at Contramar in Mexico, where she has this grilled fish.
One side is a red sauce, one side's a green sauce.
I was like, oh.
Serve the chicken breast that way.
So we have a chili black bean sauce, ginger scallion.
- What is this rice?
And you said it's chicken rice, but.
- It's chicken rice, but it's not.
I want you to taste it.
- (laughs) I'm really curious, thank you.
(laughing) Cheers.
Mm!
(talking with mouth full)
You know what that makes me wanna do?
In Malaysia, you see all these old guys that sit like this.
(laughing)
You know, when they're eating chicken rice.
It makes me wanna do that--
I'm getting comfortable.
- It's annoying that this breast is so tasty.
- I know. (laughing)
- Why are we roasting chickens at all?
It's such a pain in the ass.
- It's a mess. - It makes so much mess, yeah.
- But again, this is the byproduct.
We've taken the fat from the soup
and mixed it in with the rice.
- That's crazy.
- So this isn't the main course.
This is just the byproduct of the soup.
- This dish alone, I would be totally satisfied.
(fork scraping plate)
- Sorry, I'm finishing this food.
- No worries. - Go for it!
- I'm sorry, okay. - I'm honored.
My mom would literally just put
a whole chicken in a pot of water
and just bring it to a rapid boil.
The more I learn about Korean food, the more I realize
oh, that's the basis of a lot of different dishes,
so if you roll out pasta and tear the noodles
and you just cook it in the broth,
so it gives it the thickness and it gets cloudy,
it almost becomes like chicken and dumplings,
all right, in the American South, a dish that,
I grew up in Virginia, I love that dish.
But it's not.
It's Korean sujebi.
So all of a sudden now,
we're talking about four different dishes in this dish.
If you roast chicken on a rotisserie,
all that beautiful juice just goes away.
But if you cook it in a noodle soup,
you get all of the goodness.
(ka-ching)
- [Steven] We're truffling the soup right now.
- So why do truffles make sense for this dish?
(laughing)
- [Steven] Wow, can I-- ah.
- This is the Worth It amount.
Please, be impartial to the amount of truffles
when you're judging this (laughing)
in your minds.
- Why do truffles work in this dish?
- I think they need to be activated with fat and heat.
Sizzling right now, we have fava beans,
we have spring peas, we have some morels.
- [Andrew] Wow.
- Cheers.
Oh, I wasn't expecting it to be as clean as it is.
- It's pure chicken.
- The broth itself tastes precisely like
my mother's chicken soup.
And that's a Ukrainian chicken soup.
- What's the name of it?
(speaking in Ukrainian)
- Wow.
The chicken's been domesticated
the world over for millennia and millennia.
- Yeah.
- There's only so many ways you can cook it.
So chicken soup around the world
is pretty much the same thing.
- So I wonder, have you made this for your mother?
- Here's the thing, if I make it for my mother,
guess what I'm gonna make her?
- What?
- I'm gonna make her Southern chicken and dumplings.
- Really?
- And she's gonna be like, "This is sujebi."
(laughing) and I'm like, "Yeah, Mom.
"It's sujebi."
(laughing)
Best part of your show.
- What a soup-erb day
(laughing)
of soup.
Which soup was the most worth it to you
at its given price point?
- This is a hard one.
I think of all the expensive restaurants
there are in Los Angeles, Majordomo actually offers
some of the best value.
This may not come as a soup-rise,
(laughing)
but I have to pick Spoon by H.
That place, truly one of the best restaurants
in all of Los Angeles.
Who was your Worth It winner?
- My Worth It winner goes to Hanbat Shul-Lung-Tang.
The moment I moved to Los Angeles
and went to that restaurant,
I was in love.
That was actually the moment
I came to appreciate Los Angeles.
Adam, what's your Worth It winner?
- Spoon by H.
- Annie, who's your Worth It winner?
- Spoon by H.
- Wow. - Okay.
Next week we have what is often seen close by to soup.
- I have no idea what you're talking about.
- Salad.
- Salad. - Oh!
(brass instrumental)