One of the countless pleasures of eating a complex mole is attempting to discern the individual components that shape the dish’s full mosaic.
Like every fresh listen of a favorite concept album, each bite reveals something new from the ether of its totality; flavors that resound and linger on the tongue and mind, their names just beyond the reach of recognition.
Yangban Society, a popular new restaurant with an attached Korean "super" in Downtown’s Arts District, has introduced a whole new universe in which to speculate on these mole mysteries, serving a dark-hued, completely vegan mole based on its two chefs’ love of fermented black bean paste, their U.S. and Korean heritage, and treasured memories of a cooking class in Oaxaca they say "completely changed" the way they see food.
The dish’s inception goes back to the not-so-distant past when Katianna and John Hong, Yangban’s married chefs-and-owners who met at Melisse in Santa Monica, were working at the famed Restaurant at Meadowood, Kat in the role of chef de cuisine. During the restaurant’s annual winter break, the couple traveled with one of the restaurant’s cooks to his hometown in Oaxaca.