Chef David Chang shows us his Koreatown: Restaurants for the best dumplings, soup, short ribs and dessert

Read our interview: https://expedia.com/magazine/local-le...

According to David Chang, there are five reasons people visit Koreatown: the spas, karaoke, parties, music concerts, and of course—the delicious Korean food.

From his own Momofuku chain to Netflix’s Ugly Delicious, Chang has built a restaurant and TV empire on being an equal opportunities food obsessive. If tastes good, it is good.

Naturally, we begin our Koreatown tour by sampling the food. We start at Ham Hung, a restaurant known specifically for Pyongyang naengmyeon, a chewy buckwheat noodle soup. We then head next door to Myung In Dumplings for the freshly steamed, baseball-sized buns; and finish up at MuMu Bakery for an enormous cream cheese-topped iced coffee and taiyaki—a custard-filled pastry dessert.

To work up an appetite for dinner, Chang plays golf at the four-floor, netting-encased driving range, Aroma Golf.

Then, time for spicy galbi-jjim, braised short ribs, at Sun Nong Dan with local friends, musician Rekstizzy and artist Dumbfoundead.

We round off the day with a drink at the kitsch bar H.M.S. Bounty, which embodies some of K-Town’s old-school Hollywood glamour.