Majordomo

Living in a city like Los Angeles, it’s easy to get jaded. You don’t really care that you just saw Florence Pugh buying Gatorade at Gelson’s, or that it’s been sunny for 100 days straight. And when it comes to restaurants, you think you’ve pretty much seen it all by now: an old warehouse space that’s off the beaten path, and a waitstaff that will proudly tell you about the place takes full advantage of California’s bountiful produce. We get it, you’re an impressive restaurant in Los Angeles.

If all that sounds familiar, you might walk into Majordomo feeling pretty jaded. Everything at their large Chinatown space, at least at first glance, is something we’ve seen before - cement everything, in-season vegetables everywhere, and big cuts of meat we can easily share with all our friends. But then we start eating the food, and for the first time in a while, our dark, charcoaled hearts are genuinely surprised.

Majordomo is the first LA restaurant from David Chang, the chef and founder of NYC’s Momofuku empire and also a winner of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. While the food here can generally be categorized as Korean, Majordomo isn’t strictly a Korean restaurant. It’s somewhere you go to eat food you can’t get anywhere else.

photo credit: Jakob Layman

The menu, on paper, isn’t going to make your brain melt - it’s broken up into fairly standard sections of appetizers, vegetables, noodles, and meats, but it’s when you start looking more closely that you see the true variety of food here. If there’s another restaurant in LA where you can eat bing with smoked roe, deep-fried stuffed peppers, macaroni pasta with black truffles, and a giant spicy pork shoulder that feeds six people in one sitting, we don’t know it. And that’s the difference at Majordomo - it’s not the individual plates that are going to necessarily surprise you. It’s the cumulative effect of the whole meal, where dishes that should have no business being on your table together leave you thinking it’s the only way they should ever be served.

Plus, it’s worth mentioning that you can now actually get into the place. Unlike the chaotic early days when securing a table meant sitting at a computer every day at 10am clicking refresh until your eyes bled, now you can score a reservation with relative ease. It’ll still be crowded when you arrive and the buzz in the dining room won’t die down until close, but the era of battling with tourists for a seat at the bar or counting the number of Emmy winners within earshot is over.

And that’s exactly what our jaded little heart wants to hear.

Food Rundown

photo credit: Jakob Layman

Eggs & Smoked Roe With Bing

Winning the Alice In Wonderland Award for food that looks like it possesses magical powers, the eggs and smoked roe aren’t just visually appealing - they’re delicious too. Both on their own and with the bing.

Stuffed Peppers

These are basically tempura-fried peppers stuffed with sausage, and you need to get them. Maybe two of them. Ok, three.

photo credit: Jakob Layman

Macaroni & Chickpea With Black Truffles

It comes out of nowhere on the menu, but this pasta is one of our favorite dishes here. It’s creamy and peppery, with a heavy dose of childhood indulgence.

photo credit: Jakob Layman

Spicy Bo Ssam

Considering it feeds four grown adults, the spicy bo ssam’s $92 price tag is actually quite reasonable. That fact it tastes incredible makes it even better. It comes served in a giant pot and is so tender that all you need to cut it is a pair of ice tongs. Plus, there’s plenty of banchan to go along with it.

Whole Plate Short Rib

We’d argue that you shouldn’t come to Majordomo without at least four people, because otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to take down this massive plate of short rib. Not only is it the best thing one the menu, it’s one of the single best dishes in LA. Sliced tableside and accompanied with various sauces and leafy greens for wrapping, this is the kind of dish that quiets a table down quickly, simply because everyone can’t stop eating. Things will get going again later once you’re all in agreement on how special it tastes.