Korean Duo worth getting to know

That is the choice you make whenever you go to a Korean grill. If you like to try the many barbecues throughout the city, chances are you default to beef. If you’ve adopted Honey Pig or Iron Age as your favorite Korean restaurant, you’ve likely gone to the swine side.

At 678 in Duluth, you've got a choice on a menu that gives equal weight to a variety of different cuts of beef and pork. This restaurant is part of a Korea-based chain, and as you can see from the photo above, it has a pop sensibility. While the Korean-American club kids like to stay toward the front of the restaurant, families gravitate to the rear, where there's a large playroom for children, away from the licking flames and considerable smoke of the dining room. Throughout the space are many posters and cutout images of Kang Ho-Dong, the celebrity entertainer who owns the restaurant and apparently does a lot of camera mugging.

Our family of five decided to go for the full-on beef experience rather than ordering à la carte. It costs $99 and supposedly feeds three to four people, but we found it ample. The meal includes not only wraps, sauces, dips and banchan, but also soup, rice and a big bowl of noodle soup to finish out the meal. So, 20 bucks a head. Not bad!

Start with chadobalgi — curls of beef brisket. You grill them without unrolling them so that you end up with something like a meat Pirouette cookie.

Other items from the platter (which a waiter will cook one after the other) include kkot deung sim (ribeye steak), saeng deung sim (sirloin) and kalbi (marinated short rib).

Wrappers for the grilled meat here include bitter lettuces, perilla leaf and wedges of boiled cabbage instead of the blander red leaf lettuce you get elsewhere. There are also some rounds of pickled radish, which have a pink tinge from their marinade. I also like the option of fine sea salt as a dip. A little nugget of meat right off the grill, a few granules of salt, a swig of beer: that’s a nice thing to do to your mouth.

The name of the restaurant, by the way, has nothing to do with local area codes and everything to do with augury. Some numbers are auspicious.

3880 Satellite Blvd., Duluth, 678-549-1246

Yet Tuh:

Yet Tuh must be the most hidden restaurant on Buford Highway. You must find the driveway to the semi-empty retail center that houses it, descend a hill and keep driving around the building clockwise until you find Yet Tuh (if not Jimmy Hoffa) hidden in the back.

I imagine Yet Tuh serves the kinds of dishes that make Koreans say, “No one makes this as well as my mom. But this is close.”

The restaurant does serve a few barbecue dishes, but that’s really something you want to order at 678 or any of the scores of other places that have the table cooktops. Here, you want broiled fish, soups, stir-fries and other specialties of the house. The pork-and-kimchi stir fry is a revelation. Fatty slips of pork have a photo-filter mellowing effect on the sharp, salty tang of fermented cabbage, transforming it into a new flavor. It’s like a perfectly made salade frisée aux lardons; every drop of fat goes to good use. The warmed tofu tiles around the plate soothe and ground the dish; you need them to keep it from going beyond the porky pale.

Bin dae duk — crisp bean-batter pancakes — arrive reddened with kimchi and holding threads of pickled fern stem. The banchan here — all those little dishes that accessorize Korean meals — are better than any I’ve seen elsewhere in town. Spicy eggplant, pak choy kimchee and braised brisket with peppers count among the offerings.

Thanks to a review in Creative Loafing, Yet Tuh has become famous for its bori bap, a mixture of barley and rice into which you add warm, marinated vegetables and chile-stewed vegetables for a meal that treats your body right. An accompanying crock of white soup called kong biji holds mild tofu dregs, prized for their health benefits. This is the good-for-you repast.

I couldn’t leave without trying this restaurant’s version of omuraisu, or omelette rice. This dish originated in Japan’s coffeehouse culture, where it is considered “Western,” i.e., European-inspired cooking. In Japan, short grain rice is stir fried with ketchup and then mounded inside a paper-thin sheet of egg omelette.

At Yet Tuh, the omelette holds a simple fried rice, and all the ketchup drapes over the top. I bring this to your attention because children and kimchi-phobes will love this. More bori bop for you.

3042 Oakcliff Road, Doraville, 770-454-9292