Where can one get good spicy Korean food in LA? I hear buldak is a good dish, but where to get it? Any other spicy Korean food that is awesome?
Thanks for any pointers.
A good yook gae jang is always spicy. See also bibim naeng myun and various dishes of raw seafood marinated in chilli paste. A very hot soon dubu is also a very good thing.
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I think the spiciest Korean dish I’ve had was zam pong, which you usually find at places that specialize in jajangmyeon / zazang myun.
Yuk gae jang is supposed to be very spicy.
The spiciest Korean food I’ve been served was nowhere near as spicy as the spiciest Thai, Sichuan, or Goan dishes.
On the other hand, Pei said on Chowhound a few years ago that there’s much spicier Korean food in LA than in Oakland. I’ll see if I can get some specifics from her.
Here’s a link to a website I have found to be a valuable introduction to Korean food as well as a resource for cooking it, http://www.maangchi.com/. I hope it helps.
Try the Spicy Galbi Jjim at Sun Nong Dan. Very good stuff. But - as others have pointed out - even Spicy Korean is not very spicy.
Crab soup at Ondal hits the spot - you can choose how spicy you want it. Save room for the dough flakes and fried rice at the end of the meal.
The spicy (hot) ul-keun-ee kalgooksu @ Tofu and Noodles.
The highest level spicy at Beverly Soon Tofu. Won’t be painful spicy but should have enough of a kick.
Yeah, had that before, has a bit of a kick. But nothing like Thai food spicy.
Does anyone in LA make good Bul-Dak?
At that point can you even really taste anything besides the burn?
I can. I guess my spice tolerance may be above most white people’s?
I don’t mean pain tolerance. I mean ability to discern subtle and complex flavors at level 10 Thai spicy.
Scientifically capsaicin is used in pain relief by decreasing the function of pain fibers. No doubt it does the same to taste sensors.
Hmm, idk, I would say yes?
Bad spicy food just tends towards burn, but good spicy tends to amplify flavors to me.
Like the grilled habanero salsa at Chichen Itza for example.
It was a rhetorical question. 
If you eat spicy food and then try to do a wine tasting, anyone’s palate is useless.
Oh that might be true…
I wasn’t planning to do any wine tasting after eating the spicy Korean food though
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oh ffs. tell, which strand of dna is about spicey food tolerance, again?
No, it’s true. I’m half Korean, so I can only tolerate spicy food half the time. 
or maybe only on the left side of your mouth?
Tolerance is about practice. Something that’s inedibly spicy today will taste normal if you work up to it over time. I recently cooked myself something that was too spicy but didn’t realize it until I started violently hiccuping.
There’s an art to making really spicy food balanced. Typically it involves using different varieties of chiles and different preparations (raw, roasted, dried, fermented, smoked). There’s a scene in City of Gold at Jitlada where Jonathan Gold talks about how this one dish needs the extreme spiciness for some of the other flavors to work.
On the other hand, if a dish isn’t designed to be level-10 spicy, has only one spicy element, and you make it spicier by adding more of that, the salsa or gochujang or pepper sauce may well overpower everything else.
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