4.1
Good
211 Reviews
7152 Orangethorpe Avenue, Buena Park · 7.36 miles
Customers’ favorites
- 도가니탕 do-ga-ni-tang ox knee bone soup
- 쟁반비빔냉면 Bibim Naengmyun Spicy Mixed Buckwheat Noodles
- 육계장 Yuk-Gae-Jang Spicy Beef & Vegetable Soup
- 돈까스 don-katsu pork cutlet
“Han Yang is good. It’s also wonderfully old school. Nothing about the place feels particularly interested in being redesigned for Instagram, which I appreciate. You come here for Korean comfort food, metal dishes of banchan, enormous bowls of soup and stone pots hot enough to continue cooking your dinner while you eat it. And that stone pot is where I’d start. The gondre dolsot bibimbap was fantastic. Gondre is Korean thistle and here it gets worked through the rice with the egg, seaweed and everything else until the whole thing becomes earthy, savory and deeply satisfying. But the best part comes underneath. Leave it alone long enough and the rice against the stone develops that beautiful scorched crust, nurungji, which you eventually scrape loose and mix back through everything. That combination of the greens, sesame, egg and crispy rice is ridiculously good. There are dishes you finish because you’re hungry and dishes where you keep digging around the bottom of the bowl because you’re convinced there must be another good piece hiding somewhere. This was the latter. The galbitang was more complicated for me. The beef itself was excellent. Generous pieces, tender, falling easily from the bone and soft enough that our kids loved it. Plenty of green onion, too. My issue was the broth. I prefer galbitang on the restrained side so I can decide where it goes from there. Same reason I like seolleongtang arriving almost defiantly plain, give me the broth and let me dress it up myself with salt, saeujeot or whatever else I want. Han Yang has already made those decisions for you. The galbitang broth was noticeably sweet and salty and eventually it became a little much for me. That’s preference as much as criticism, plenty of people will probably love it exactly as it arrives. I just wanted the volume turned down. The banchan was similarly mixed but mostly good. The napa kimchi was solid and nicely balanced. The kkakdugi was particularly good. The mustard greens, however, were ferociously sour. I like fermented food. These had me physically wincing. The dipping sauce for the galbi was excellent, though and I kept going back to it. Rice was average and a little dry. It did its job. Service was good and the whole experience was easy. The room itself has some age on it, tables are fairly close together and depending on where you’re seated you may find yourself with a commanding view of the bathroom door. Nobody has ever requested the chef’s table at the restroom, but here we are. Somehow I don’t particularly mind any of it. Han Yang feels like a restaurant that knows what it is. It isn’t polished into anonymity. People are here eating giant bowls of soup, mixing rice in scorching stone pots and getting on with their lives. And when a restaurant can put something as good as that gondre bibimbap in front of me, I can forgive a dry bowl of rice and a bathroom with excellent sightlines. Absolutely coming back. And next time, I’m getting that bibimbap again.”
Korean · $$$
