The kind, middle-aged women at Mhat offer home-style dishes—comforting soups and stews and things that warm you from the inside out. Their signature dish is dahk galbi, a stew that morphs into at least three other dishes as you eat it. What begins as a soup of dark-meat chicken swimming in a gochujang-tinted broth with sliced potatoes, cabbage, chewy rice cakes, hard-boiled eggs and perilla leaves transforms as you eat it. The soup reduces and thickens into a spicy glaze that coats everything. And when you’re nearly finished, one of the women will add rice to the dregs and stir-fry it to make a risotto-like dish. You leave with a distended tummy and a feeling as though you’ve been fed and coddled by a Korean mom.
8412 Moody St., La Palma, (714) 252-5033.
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