Eggs benedict and Champagne may be your idea of Sunday brunch. But I'll take abalone porridge and barley tea.
This Korean rice porridge (juk) is the perfect way to ease into the day, as good a weekend restorative as Mexico's menudo. It's light and delicate, just bits of abalone mixed with soft rice, an egg on top and a few strands of seaweed.
The place where I tasted it, The Oxford Palace Hotel's Take Sushi Restaurant in Koreatown, is perfect for brunch too. The room is quiet and coolly elegant, set off by bamboo-etched glass panels that surround the center tables and give a sense of privacy to the outer rim.
The table linens are dark green and pale blue, colors that aren't jarring, if you've celebrated too much the night before.
But if you can stand more of a jolt, there are plenty of spicy dishes on the Korean side of the menu, and you can pep up the porridge with sauce from these.
That’s what I did with “black codfish braising” (eundaegu jorim), a succulent dish of tender fish and translucent radish in spicy sweet red sauce.
My friends were hungry for Korean flavors, so we skipped the Japanese side of the menu to order such standards as barbecued prime short ribs (galbi) and dolsot bibim bap (mixed rice in a stone pot), then veered into a less familiar stew (jjigae) of pollack roe and vegetables.
This soupy, spicy dish was interesting and generous with roe, but the roe had been overcooked and so was dense and dry. It was fresh, though, and the vegetables, including enoki mushrooms, were nice.
Standouts among the five or six banchan were very fresh kimchi and spicy-sweet squid strands so delicious that I asked for more.
The kitchen sent out a first-course salad—lettuce and cucumbers with a citrus flavored ground topping. And we finished with a plate of fruits that had been cut and arranged with care.
The restaurant offers something for every taste, from teriyaki to a $120 sashimi platter and an $80 sushi and sashimi combination for a well-heeled individual at the sushi bar.
The abalone porridge is at the lower end of the price scale, $11.95, or about $3 a person if you take into account that it was large enough to serve four.
Take Sushi Restaurant, Oxford Palace Hotel & Galleria, 745 S. Oxford Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90005. Tel: (213) 389-8000. Open daily from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.
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