Wilshire Boulevard is expected to be closed to traffic between Western Avenue and Fairfax Avenue from 9:00 pm on Friday to 5:00 am on Saturday on account of the 340-ton boulder that is being transported to LACMA.
Destination: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the largest art museum in the western United States. Object: 340-ton rock from Riverside County, meant for an art installation entitled Levitated Mass
Update: For photos of the event, see the KoreatownLA community’s FB page.
Caught sight of Latino workers replacing the sign at Goong last Saturday. The place will henceforth be known to passersby as Bulgogi House.
The Korean girl even today still answers the phone with “Goong” and when prompted, she said yeah, they changed the name outside, but the owners and the concept remain the same.
Lunch AYCE options are $9.99 and $13.99 while dinner options are $16.99 and $19.99.
Though in this case there have been “Bulgogi House” restaurants in other parts of the country in years past, I sense a trend locally to replace Korean restaurant names with generic appellations that foreigners can more easily remember.
Can’t cite a specific example for a full-service restaurant, but what stood out was when Aio coffee shop put up a very stark “Coffee Boba Hookah” sign (not sure if she’s still open by the way… had a run-in with the health department, last I heard).
I have deep fondness for the use of classic Korean names for restaurants, but I realize keenly the marketing effectiveness of having a memorable name. A friend flew in from out of state more than a year ago and briefly glimpsed the Oo-kook logo and I told her it could be translated as “Cow Country” or “Cow Nation” — even to this day, when we talk, she references it and the Honey Pig across the street. She can’t remember the name of the restaurant where we actually ate that evening!
Still, it would be nice to see a Korean restaurant be a marketing success and a critical hit even with an alien-sounding Korean name… Oh, wait. We already have that…
(Never liked the word “Bulgogi” as it’s written in English… not aesthetically pleasing as all. Visually and auditorily gross. It’s sort of like how ugly the words “kimbop” or “kimbob” are, though “kimbap” isn’t so bad. Thank God I know Korean, so that I see the hangeul in my head instead of the English transliterations when I eat. I had kimbap with perilla leaves yesterday and a bulgogi doshirak today for lunch.)
Bulgogi House (Goong AYCE Korean BBQ Restaurant)
Address : 3600 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90010
Phone : 213-388-1988
