The Bloggomist: Table of Content
Food review

Some women, when they crave, fantasize about sweets. Hot fudge sundaes, red velvet cupcakes, chocolate-covered anything and everything… but me? I want none of it. My hankerings typically run to the spice. If I can get that heat fried? Nice. Now if you can make it a chicken wing, oh, baby. You just might persuade me to do something I’d not in my right mind.

If you’ve lived in Los Angeles long enough, you’re familiar with Koreatown’s OB Bear, a place of dubious upholstery and tobacco smoke infused into its wood walls. OB’s 양념 닭 날개/yang nyum dalk nal gae/spicy-sauced chicken wings are a fabled thing, a vivid preparation everyone and her mother knows about — it actually was my mom who introduced this sticky icky of dishes to me many years ago — and finding a drummette equal to OB’s in sheer unctuousness and brazen disregard for morning-after BTS* is a difficult thing.

But what’s great about that rendition is also what’s not: it’s only available after dark; it’s not one-diner friendly; it’s near impossible to order without succumbing to the pressure to “Add a beer [or three] to that?” This also means that getting my OB-wing fix requires planning and, usually, a designated driver. So what’s a girl to do when she’s got to have some combination of crisp and hot and hot and fowl for lunch or an early dinner? Enter the House of Joy.

House of Joy, otherwise known as Jin Heung Gak, is a Korean-style Chinese restaurant that has been in business since 1984. Tucked into the far corner of a strip mall on N. Pacific Ave. across the street from HK Market, House of Joy offers an impressive, cost-effective lunch menu available on weekdays from 11:30 – 3:00 p.m. While locals drop in at all business hours to get jja-jang myun (noodles with black bean sauce) or jjam-ppong (spicy seafood soup noodles), my devotion to the Peking chicken won’t deign to consider other options. For $9 and change — which includes tax and a 20% tip — the lunch special provides soup (neither briny nor bland); fried or steamed rice; a cream cheese rangoon and an eggroll (think double-robusto length and girth); and 9 — count ‘em, nine – meaty drummettes and winglets in all their spicy-sweet, crispy-crunch, all-over-your-fingers-and-teeth-sticky gallinaceousness.

Plenty of people, Koreans included, get all kinds of weirded-out by a person’s dining alone, so I enter the House knowing I’ll get quizzical/pitying/sometimes even smug looks when I order sans escort. But it honestly doesn’t bother me. Because when that plate comes out and those wings all orange in their peppery flame land before me, there is Joy in the House. And it resides in the Peking.For hours, menu, and directions, visit: http://houseofjoychinese.com/default.aspx

*BTS: Send me a message or post your question if you’ve a burning curiosity about this. (Trust me. It’s better to learn after you’ve read the article.)

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For more by E. Tae Cha, visit: www.evilmonito.com/author/elaine.

Published on 2 December 2009 | 1 |