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| - 2.5 - Food is a 4 but Service is a 1.
Ahhh, so much good and bad.
Come here for authentic, AYCE Korean BBQ. Now, this ain't no Chako or Korean Grill House (the Chinese interpretation of Korean BBQ) so don't expect any salmon, green peppers, sushi or anything of that sort. At $20.99 per person, you get 4 types of meat - pork belly, pork neck, beef brisket and bulgogi. There are other AYCE combinations you can choose from (i.e: pork belly and pork neck for $16.99 pp) but your best bet is to just get all four.
Accompanying the meat are side dishes, white pickled radish, shredded lettuce in spicy sauce, lettuce, a bowl of white rice for each person and a small soybean paste stew to share (doenjang jjigae). You can devour the meat however you want but lettuce wraps are probably the most common and most flavorful way to eat it. I have no complaints about the food, everything is delicious!
The environment and setup of the restaurant is very typical of a Korean meathouse and doesn't stray away from what you'd find in Korea at all. It really made me nostalgic of when I lived in Seoul which was nice.
Now the negatives which are all very substantial:
It's a family run business so the owners do their best to tend to everyone but this means service can be REAAALLY darn slow. Especially when every table has so many refillable dishes, I would imagine things to get really hectic. They're pretty friendly and willing to get you everything you ask for but it just takes a long time and may require repetitive requests on your part. What's worse is that we were a party of 6 and sat in one of the booths with no assistance bell. You can imagine how difficult it was for us to get their attention.
In addition to that, it's not uncommon for AYCE establishments to implement a 2-hour eating rule but it tends to be loosely enforced and meant to discourage those who order way too much or stay way too long, neither in which we did. Promptly at the 2-hour mark (from when we sat), we were told we couldn't order anymore meat. Now how it works here is that 3 of the 4 meats are served first and the bulgogi comes out LAST on its own because they have to change the grill. So you have to be strategic somehow because 1. You can't switch back and 2. You have to give yourself enough time to do a few rounds of the bulgogi ( and trust me, you will want to because it's good). When our 2 hours hit, we hadn't gotten to the bulgogi yet and our server was not willing to accommodate us. But the owner was nice enough to "do us a favor" and give us a small portion of bulgogi. I'm half grateful but also half rolling my eyes.
We left with some of us still feeling unsatisfied and hungry because there were 6 people to ONE fairly small grill. And if you take into account that we had slow service, how much could 1 person have actually eaten?
My advice:
- Come with a small group (less than 4) so you can reasonably share one grill or have a party of 8 cause that's the magical number to get 2 grills (maybe even 7, not sure)
- Avoid sitting in the booths because you're less likely to get their attention and it'll just take away from your dinner when you spend half your time trying to hunt them down
Final thoughts:
I wouldn't boycott this place entirely only because the food was great and AYCE Korean BBQ for four types of meat in Toronto is quite rare (most Korean places don't do AYCE and if they do, usually it's just pork belly) but it may just not be worth all the hassle in this case.
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