For more than two decades, MDK Noodles has sat along the busy corridor of Wilshire Boulevard that runs through Koreatown, where it churns out reams of knife-cut noodles and plump mandu. Chul Heay Shin first opened the restaurant as Myung Dong Kyoja in Koreatown in 2002; in 2019, Shin’s daughter, Stella, and her cousins, Leah and Kyojae Shin, took over the business, renaming it MDK Noodles. In the brightly lit, minimalist dining room, the restaurant serves steaming bowls of knife-cut noodles in long-simmered chicken broth along with delicate steamed mandu packed with pork. While the rapidly changing Koreatown neighborhood has lost a number of its old-school restaurants over the years, MDK remains a destination for classic, soul-warming cooking served every day of the week, from breakfast through dinner.
Sick-day takeout, group meals when everyone wants something Korean but can’t decide on a single dish, dinners before catching a show at the Wiltern, and breakfast soup.
MDK Noodles sells sides of its chicken broth that keep well in the freezer for a rainy day.