Miga

Korean food is ready for its close-up - with or without its fiery funk. The pleasantly posh new Miga, which dials down the chile volume without completely losing its soul in Center City's first upscale Korean dining room, is proof of that.

True, Miga lacks some of the intensity of my favorite charcoal-fired grill houses of North Philadelphia. But I suspect a lot of mainstream Philadelphians will settle into the cushy white leather chairs in this tented room and finally get to taste the wonders of a dolsot bibimbap, a hot stone bowl topped with crisping rice, a colorful pinwheel of vegetables and soy-sweetened minced beef. If they're lucky, they'll learn how to fold lettuce leaves around freshly grilled morsels of galbi short ribs, shredded poufs of tart scallion salad, raw garlic chips, and a dab of ssamjang paste. It's a mouth-filling one-bite package of cold lettuce crunch, hot seared meat and spicy savor that could very well become an addiction.

These alone are horizon-opening experiences I wish for every adventurous eater. So what has taken so long? Why has Korean cuisine remained the last frontier of distinctive Asian flavors yet to be assimilated into the American pantry?

The most obvious answer is that genuine Korean cooking - the kind that pungently perfumes the air outside the grill houses and soft-tofu casserole joints of Olney - sizzles at an intensity of fire-red spice that can intimidate a novice palate. The seriously fermented kick of old-school kimchi, cabbage fully ripened a few months after a proper earthenware burial in the backyard, is still well beyond the comfort zone of most mainstream American taste buds.

But there is so much else to love about the Korean table, from the generous array of free pickled nibbles that precede a typical meal (the banchan) to the tabletop grills that send up the ambrosial aroma of searing marinated meats, that it's puzzling why even an abbreviated version of this tradition hasn't made more forays beyond its established ethnic enclaves.