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Spicy Rice Cakes in a Garden Setting

This isn't your usual pasta. As a matter of fact, it isn't pasta at all, but rice cakes in a red sauce with seafood and vegetables.

Like a picture, it has a frame, golden slices of kabocha squash. 

The place where you can eat this is Cafe Scent, a Korean coffee shop with a long menu of snacks, main dishes and sweets.

This dish is a fusion version of tteokbokki. a rice cake stir-fry that often is very spicy. At Cafe Scent, the sauce is lighter and less spicy. Along with shrimp, squid and a single mussel, the mix includes mushrooms and red and green bell peppers. On top is melted mozzarella, like a pizza.

Cafe Scent gets its name not just from aromatic dishes like this but from its other specialty, flowers. The shop deals in wedding bouquets, gift baskets, floral decorations for events, table centerpieces and the like. 

It's cute and cozy with two rooms, one rather dark. The other (above) is lighter and more gardenlike.

Cafe Scent, 3680 Wilshire Blvd., #PO3, Los Angeles, CA 90010. (The entrance is around the corner on Serrano Ave., south of Wilshire.) Tel: (213) 383-9440.

A Korean Soup to Cure Your Ills

You have a cold, a virus, you're tired out and dragging. Don't worry. There's a quick cure--in Koreatown. It's the bean sprout soup (above) at Chunju Han-Il Kwan, a small restaurant tucked into the corner of a mall on 6th Street.

Your cure comes in a black stone bowl that right off sends steam into your stuffy nostrils. It's crammed with soy bean sprouts (the kind with the big yellow bulb on one end), rice, bits of beef, an egg that cooks in the soup, green onions and spicy red pepper flakes to clear your head. And there's a healthy pile of crisp seaweed strands on top.  

You also get a little dish of super salty shrimp sauce. Of all things, it's lavender--since when did shrimp turn purple?  Next to it are containers of sesame seeds and tiny red pepper grains. With these, you can flavor the soup any way you like.

A Korean friend swears this bowl of goodies cures her colds. Above, you can see how popular it is--almost the whole table has ordered it. 

And you get still more--at least eight banchan (six are in the photo above), which are as comforting and homey as the soup. The mix might include steamed eggs (mild and nourishing), slippery japchae (stir-fried transparent noodles), marinated vegetables and soft squares of acorn jelly that taste really good despite their murky color. There's kimchi too, of course, and my favorite--spicy marinated fish cake.

That same Korean friend who comes here to cure her colds says the banchan are home style, like her grandmother would make.  But don't wait until you're sick to try the food. It's good for you any time. 

Chunju Han-Il Kwan,  3450 W 6th St, No. 106, Los Angeles, CA 90010. Tel: (213) 480-1799.

A Royal Launch for a Korean Guide

This was no all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue but royal food, delicate morsels such as lobster with sweet and spicy mango-bean paste sauce (above); abalone from far-off Jeju Island and scallops scented with ginseng.

The occasion was the launch of the Korean Food Foundation's guidebook to Korean restaurants in Los Angeles (disclaimer: I 'm the author). This is the Foundation's first restaurant guide for the United States. Another, for New York, was introduced two days later.

For the launch, two pavilions were set up in the courtyard of Madang Plaza in Koreatown, one for drinks, appetizers and speeches, the other for a  dinner designed around Korean wraps, called ssam. The chef was Myung Sook Lee of the California Culinary Academy.

Dinner started with the scallop (above), serving as a "wrap" for diced ginseng. The sauce below it is made with green tea.  On that same plate were a raw tuna and pear wrap and raw salmon wrapping fine onion slivers, with a sauce made from gochujang (red pepper paste). The lobster came next, finished off with fried sea kelp, sesame leaves and truffles.

You know how awkward it is to gnaw bones at a party. That problem was solved for Korean royalty by mincing beef and wrapping it around mushrooms to make an appropriately dainty morsel (above left).

On the plate with it is the Jeju abalone on a fried rice cake, both wrapped with Korean water parsley and seasoned with truffle honey soy sauce.

You may have eaten bulgogi (grilled marinated beef), but probably not like this (above), accompanied by assorted leafy wraps, called bossam kimchi. Actually, the meat isn't bulgogi but neobiani, which is its royal name.

Noodles in anchovy broth came with this course, and dinner ended with dainty confections, one made with ginger braised in honey and coated with pine nut powder, the other an elegant version of the fried sweet yagwa. Along with these, guests drank bracing cups of ginseng tea with pine nuts.

Stacks of the guidebooks were given out at the party. The week of March 4, you will be able to access it online at the Korean Food Foundation's website, www.hansik org. You will also be able to download a "Korean Restaurant Guide LA" app on any iOS or Android device. Most of the 40 restaurants in the book are in Koreatown, but some are in other parts of Los Angeles, and two are in Orange County.

Something Different--a Purple Latte

Remember that old ditty, "I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one"?

That cow may still be hard to find, but any day you can have a purple latte at Paris Baguette, the Korean-French bakery chain.

Actually, it's a purple sweet potato latte, nothing but purple sweet potato blended with milk, which is as close as it gets to a cow. No coffee included.

This delicate lavendar drink comes hot or iced. It may look beige in the photo, but that's due to the lighting and lack of Photoshop. Trust me, it's truly purple, although very pale. You won't find a latte like it at Starbucks or Peet's. But that's why you go to Koreatown, to taste something other than the same old thing.

Paris Baguette, 3470 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, CA 90020 (in Koreatown). Tel: (213) 384-0404. And other locations.