Woo Lae Oak

Most Korean food has a robust quality, but at Woo Lae Oak it has an uncharacteristic delicacy, most evident in a dish such as chap chae -- ordinarily little more than a Korean version of chow mein with clear noodles. Here the noodles are stir-fried with vegetables and soy sauce and then rolled up in thinly sliced daikon so that they look like aristocratic little egg rolls. On their own, they are subtle; dipped into the fiery red pepper sauce, they take on a more ferocious aspect.

Spicy hotness is one face of Korean cooking; sweetness is another. Koreans are famous for their beef tartare, usually sliced into slivers rather than ground into mush, then marinated in an appealingly sweet, sesame-scented sauce. The beef tartare at Woo Lae Oak is very good, but the tuna tartare is extraordinary. Crisp Asian pears are shaved into long strands, then topped with ice-cold strips of raw tuna. A few pine nuts (another Korean staple) are strewn across the top. It's the sort of dish you urge your fish-hating friends to try because it's so delicious, and so delicate, that you can't imagine anybody disliking it.

You do have to like fish to be impressed by bin dae duk, a sort of pancake made of ground mung beans, scallions, kimchee and bean sprouts. This is a fairly common Korean dish, but here the kitchen has given the rustic dish an upscale interpretation, topping each pancake with tiny oysters.

Everybody who likes to eat will like the barbecue that anchors the menu at Woo Lae Oak. The center of each table opens up to reveal a built-in grill; there are about a dozen different meats and fish you can order to throw onto it. You can find Korean barbecue in hundreds of places in Southern California, but it's rarely of this exalted quality. Order the scallops, for instance, and you get big, juicy slices that taste as if they have just emerged from the ocean. Kal bi -- marinated, boneless short ribs -- is extraordinarily tender meat.