Bay Pocha Was Made for a Late-Night Feast With Friends

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

Back in college, my friends and I would eat at the Fontainbleau Diner in Piscataway, New Jersey, every Thursday night after our weekly club meeting. This meant 10 or 20 of us, mostly Asian American, rolling in at 10 p.m. to commandeer a row of pushed-together two-tops. We were loud and giddy, reveling in our Monte Cristos, chicken fingers and root beer floats.

Unfortunately, here in the Bay Area, a lot of the late-night restaurants aren’t built for that kind of large-group merrymaking — not when you’re squished up at a tiny bar counter or, in some cases, there isn’t any seating at all.

Bay Pocha, a Korean pub on Ocean Avenue near Stonestown, is the exception that proves the rule. Even though it isn’t a particularly big restaurant, a long communal table, spacious enough to fit 20 people, runs down the center of the dining room, and the menu skews toward hearty, shareable dishes: bubbling stews and hot pots, and big platters piled high with braised and stir-fried meats.

Named after Korea’s famed “pocha” (or pojangmacha) street carts and semi-outdoor food stalls, Bay Pocha has a similar aesthetic to other Korean pubs in the Bay Area with its cheery K-pop soundtrack and neon-lit signs advertising soju and Korean beer brands. On weekends, it’s open until 1 a.m. and, on a recent Friday night, it only seemed to get busier and more rambunctious as the night got later.

The broad menu runs through the greatest hits of the kind of booze-friendly food you would find at your standard Bay Area soju bang: Korean fried chicken, cheese corn, tteokbokki. But where Bay Pocha sets itself apart is in its selection of big, celebratory dishes — the kind you’re surprised and delighted to be able to share with a group of friends at 11 o’clock at night. That includes harder-to-find dishes like spicy stir-fried chicken feet and jokbal, a.k.a. braised pig trotters, which Bay Pocha offers in both spicy and non-spicy versions.

But we had mainly come for the hidden star of the menu, the bossam, or braised pork belly wraps, which is probably the dish Bay Pocha is best known for, even though it isn’t listed on the menu — you have to know to ask for it. It’s a huge platter of tender, fatty meat, cut into thick slices and fanned out like a beautiful flower, with a salad of thinly slivered scallions piled in the center. Make sure you also order the ssam set — a plate of lettuce, raw and pickled jalapeños, raw garlic and spicy ssamjang sauce — so that you can eat the pork belly Korean-style, as lettuce wraps.

For each ssam, you’ll want a couple of slices of pork, a tangle of scallion salad, a smear of ssamjang, maybe some kimchi and, if you’re like me, an unconscionable amount of garlic. Build each wrap on your plate or do it “freestyle,” the way I learned from watching too many Korean dramas, holding the lettuce leaf in front of your mouth like you’re setting a trap, then chopsticking all of the other ingredients into the leaf in one smooth motion. Take it down in one bite if you can. Either way, the result is delicious — unctuous and meaty, spicy and sharp, with enough freshness from the lettuce that you don’t feel weighed down.

The other thing the restaurant does well is its ample selection of shareable stews and hot pots, the most striking of which is the army stew, or budae jjigae, a Korean pub staple whose use of American processed foods has its roots in the U.S. post-war military occupation of South Korea. At Bay Pocha, they light up a portable gas burner, then bring the big pot of bubbling red broth to your table to finish cooking. The soup comes loaded with spicy pork, Spam, sliced up hot dogs, onions, kimchi, tofu, two different kinds of rice cakes, and a big block of instant ramen topped with two slices of American cheese. It is a lot. But for us, it was pure comfort food. The salty, spicy broth got more and more flavorful as the night went on, and with some white rice on the side to soak up the soup, we stretched the leftovers into two more meals.

As if on cue, toward the end of the night, a boisterous, Cantonese-speaking adult volleyball or baseball team in matching red jackets came in and spread themselves out at the long communal table — the same kind of squad I’d go on those late-night diner runs with in college. They were celebrating, or consoling themselves, with a bubbling pot of galbijjim (short rib stew) that the server ceremoniously scorched with a blow torch until the cheese on top was brown-speckled and melty. I wasn’t sure how their night had gone up until then, but it seemed clear that they were ending it in the best possible way.

Bay Pocha is located at 2642 Ocean Ave. in San Francisco. The restaurant is open Monday through Thursday from 5 p.m.–midnight, Friday and Saturday 5 p.m.–1 a.m. and Sunday 5–11:30 p.m.; it’s also open for lunch 11 a.m.–2 p.m. daily.