TBA
POT
No clue on the Line Hotel in Koreatown (the former Wilshire Plaza-- or was it a Radisson?), but Chef Roy Choi recently invaded it with his new restaurant, POT.
POT is actually three places, POT Bar in the Lobby (a nice little stand of a bar adorning a corner of the lobby), POT Commissary for baked goods and coffee (they looked good, casual setting, but not cheap), and POT the somewhat-more-homestyle Korean restaurant.
The menu is a newspaper type affair with a Korean adjumma on the cover, smoking a huge blunt. The decor is mid-90s or early 2000s Asian cheap/casual, something our group was very familiar with. Add in a few touches here and there (aprons?) and oddly, it works well for what feels like down-home cooking with Chef Roy's fusion touch.
Ban chan is a bit unfamiliar to non-Koreans (more traditional? I have no idea...), paying a few bucks more brings some pretty good regular kimchi, plus some white kimchi, which unlike other white kimchis, seem to be laced heavily with asian pears. Not quite sure how we felt about that til the meal went on, and then the flavor proved to be a nice balance with the rest of the meal. Ditto for the kimchi cocktail, which was definitely different-- but again worked well with the meal.
Blue crab was pretty good, but a bit too heavy on the soy sauce. Would probably skip the next time as other places do it better. The Beep Beep (uni over dynamite fried rice) was heavenly, though, and the main course for us-- a medium hot pot "Old School" (bulgogi, kimchi, noodles, scallion) was pretty damned good. Not too intense by Chef Roy standards, but still intense enough that you'd definitely want to eat it over a bowl of white rice. The other hot pots and smaller dishes, sadly, would have to wait for another day.
Given Chef Roy's popularity, who knows when this other day will be. POT is tasty, but even minus the blue crab, not particularly cheap, and again, oh the crowds this place is sure to develop...