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Poorly signed and stashed away on the second floor of a nondescript building, Seoul Garden doesn't attract many walk-ins. Still, the place is packed with young diners and salarymen who come for the well-executed Korean standards, like bimimbap and seafood pancakes, crisp in some places and pleasantly doughy in others. They also know that although Seoul Garden has all the typical K-town barbecue trappings, with plenty of carnivorous options to char on the tabletop grills, the restaurant also features stews that flaunt its exceptional house-made tofu, fabulously silky stuff that shows up with seafood, kimchee, or lip-smackingly salty soybean paste. Chicken stew with ginseng is disappointingly mild, given Korean cuisine’s spicy-pungent rep; the opaque broth is dense with giant clumps of chewy, sticky rice and jujubes, vaguely sweet Chinese dates. But even so, it's as pleasantly bland and constitutionally restorative as old-fashioned Jewish penicillin. — JJ Goode

Soybean-paste tofu stew, $9.95; kalbi, $15.95; chicken stew with ginseng, $15.95; dol sot bimimbap, $13.95