Dae Bok

• Cuisine(s): Korean
  Hours: Daily 11am-10pm
  Price: $$
• Payment Types: MasterCard, Visa
  Serving: Dinner, Lunch
  Alcohol: Beer/Wine
• Reservations: Accepted
  Parking: Valet

Description

In a Koreatown where restaurants tend to specialize in one dish, whether it be blood sausage, Jeon Ju bibimbap or bubbling goat stew, Dae Bok is the blowfish specialist, its sign emblazoned with a rather dignified example of the breed, its all-seafood menu dominated (at least in the untranslated part) by the fish that Japanese aesthetes and Homer Simpson call fugu. You may have had elaborate fugu meals at upper-end Japanese restaurants here or in Japan: toasted fins steeped in sake; strips of skin arranged into an exquisite salad; and the flesh microtomed into transparent petals of sashimi arranged into intricate mosaics of mortality. There is almost a rite built around the eating of fugu in Japan, heightened by danger, flavored with death. (In reality, restaurant blowfish is probably safer than restaurant steak - the toxin is concentrated in the fish's easily avoided liver and reproductive organs, and there hasn't been a fatality in a restaurant since the '60s.) See full review.