Every meal at Soban starts in the same eye-catching way: a dozen colorful squares of banchan laid on the table all at once, arranged by your server in a perfect grid like a new game of solitaire. It’s all but impossible not to reach for your phone and snap a photo of the spread (it clearly satisfies the rule of thirds) before diving in. Chopsticks zig-zag across the table in all different directions, moving from marinated black beans to cucumber kimchi to stir-fried anchovies. Most of what is on the little plates originates from the long line of glass jugs filled with fermented things that wrap around the room’s front counter—an outward sign of the deliberate care and attention that go into each little detail here. The banchan is quite literally just the beginning at this casual Koreatown spot, and the rest of the hit-filled menu will pull you further into the hypnotizing Soban-verse. Ideally, you’ll show up with at least a group of four so you can order all three of the restaurant’s non-negotiable signatures: the spicy braised black cod with meat so soft it slips of the bones, galbijjim featuring big chunks of short rib in a pool of rich braising sauce, and the gooey soy-marinated raw crab that doesn’t hold back on the garlic. Each of them is large enough to share, and comes with personal metal bowls of steaming purple rice. Add on seafood tofu pancakes and an order of funky kimchi jjigae, and congrats, you’re sitting in front of the best Korean feast available in LA. Whether you show up at lunch or dinner, there’s a good chance you’ll be doted on by the mother-daughter duo who run the place, and by the end of the meal, you might be tempted to add them to your emergency contacts. They’ll swing by to mix rice into saucy crab shells before you’ve even lifted your spoon, refill your cup with hot barley tea before it hits half-empty, and bring over mugs of green plum juice as a just-sweet-enough finish. From the outside, Soban blends in with any other Korean restaurant on Olympic, and it isn’t anywhere near as old as some of the local legacy restaurants that have been around since the '80s, or as flashy as some of the newer spots (it opened in 2009). There’s no alcohol available—sorry, soju bombs fans—though that plum juice does take the sting off a bit. If you’re looking for the largest portions or the lowest prices, other places in Koreatown do braised short rib and raw crab well enough. But it should tell you something that when the cast from the South Korean film Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020, they headed to Soban right after to celebrate.