SongDo

With such a wealth of brilliant Korean food on the North Shore, it can be difficult for any one place to stand out. But SongDo, in its warm, albeit slightly dowdy spot in a Browns Bay strip mall, persistently captures our attention. Even the most standard and expected of dishes — bibimbap, fried chicken, the essential soups and stews, sizzling plates of meat with rice — are treated with impressive care. We are big fans of the less-commonly-seen menu items, too. One of these, altang, is a spicy soup of fish roe, bean sprouts and mussels. Another is dwaeji gukbap, a pork-bone soup with minced meat that gets more delicious as you eat it, particularly near the end if you stir your remaining rice in. If you go in summer, they might be serving an invigoratingly cold dish of noodles in a chilled milky broth made of soybeans. The pork backbone soup is less of a rarity across this city’s Korean restaurants, but SongDo’s version remains one of the best we’ve ever eaten. Basically heaven in soup form.