Gamjatang is a Korean pork back-bone soup made from the neck and spine bones of pig. This spicy stew contains the pork from these bones,  large chunks of potatoes, korean cabbage, sesame leaves,  bean sprouts and sprinkled with Perilla powder. In fact, gamja means pork spine, but is more commonly referred to as potatoes. To make this stew, it is necessary to boil the pork bones to remove excess blood and impurities from the bones prior to cooking the bones with vegetables. In the end, you get a heaping pot of tender meat and flavorful broth. In Koreatown, downtown Los Angeles, Buchun Gamjatang is a hole-in-the-wall (not Yelp-hyped YET) restaurant that serves gamjatang with other Korean dishes at such an amazingly cheap price.. I still can’t wrap my head around it!!

For $39.99, you can get a large pot of pork bone stew that says it feeds 3-4 people, but I honestly thing it feeds WAY more than that! Everyone and us; we always have leftovers. The stew really creamy, thick and savory; packed full of flavors. Eating the tender pork with the soft potatoes and drinking the hearty stew at the same time was overwhelmingly satisfying. Even when you get full, you can’t stop. It’s too good.

You also get an endless supply of Korean side dishes 🙂

Our Korean neighbor donned gloves and broke apart the bones and meats into manageable chunks for us. The meat was cooked so tender that it just literally falls off the bones.

Double-glove because it is HOT!

Here is a picture of the stew before we started to eat 🙂

Now if you pay cash, you get a FREE special large dish of boiled and sliced pork. This is a lot of pork!! And very good.. It is a cold dish that was a wonderful break to eat in the midst of the hotness from the stew. The Koreans taught me how to eat this: grab a piece of pork and layer it with some seaweed, some pickled spicy radish and dip it in the sauce. Yummy!! There were just too many sweet and salty and spicy cold flavors to keep track of in my mouth.

At the end, they make seaweed kimchi fried rice for you with some of the stew! Don’t worry, they don’t use all of your leftover stew.. You can still take that to-go! 😉

When they added cheese to the rice, my heart melted! Haha As if you aren’t full enough from the pork bone stew and the boiled pork, now you have cheesy kimchi fried rice with seaweed to chow down!!! We ordered a large for 6 people, but I think we could have gotten away with size medium and still have leftovers! Their servings are just so ginormous.

I like how they also have a cute coffee machine for Korean coffee! No Korean meal goes without soju and at the end, you need a dose of sweet and milky coffee to take that alch-y edge off 😉

For a quarter, you get a small cup of sweet and milky Korean coffee! Yummmmmm..

So just a small tip to reiterate: bring cash when you dine here! It is well worth it. <3