Korean BBQ, Explained: How to Order, Grill, and Not Panic

Korean BBQ is one of the best nights out that food can buy: meat sizzling in the middle of your own table, a dozen little side dishes, everything interactive and loud and fun. It's also slightly bewildering the first time, because the menu assumes you know the system. Here's the system.

How the night works

You order meat by the plate, usually with a two plate minimum, and it arrives raw. Either you grill it yourself over the burner set into your table, or at some spots the staff grill it for you, flipping with tongs and cutting with scissors, which is the traditional tool and better at the job than any knife. Everything else on the table, the array of small dishes called banchan, comes free and gets refilled if you ask.

That's the whole model: meat, fire, sides, wrap, repeat.

What to order first

Samgyeopsal is thick cut pork belly, the beloved default, cheap and impossible to ruin. Galbi is marinated short rib, sweet and deeply savory, the crowd pleaser. Bulgogi is thin marinated beef that cooks in seconds. Chadolbaegi is paper thin brisket that curls and crisps almost instantly. A safe first table for two: one pork belly, one galbi, and a stone pot of soup or rice to anchor it.

Unmarinated meats show off the restaurant's beef quality; marinated ones show off its kitchen. Ordering one of each tells you everything about the place.

The wrap is the whole point

Take a lettuce or perilla leaf, add a piece of grilled meat, a dab of ssamjang, the thick savory paste, maybe a sliver of grilled garlic or kimchi, fold it into a one bite bundle, and eat it in one go. That bundle, the ssam, is the flavor engine of the entire meal. One bite, by tradition and by physics. Building a two bite wrap is how you end up wearing it.

Grill etiquette, minus the stress

Flip the meat once or twice, not constantly. Move cooked pieces to the cooler edge. Ask for a grill change when it gets crusted and black, every place expects it. Scissors are for cutting meat into bite size pieces after it cooks. And nobody at any Korean BBQ restaurant in history has judged a table for asking how something works. Asking is normal.

Finding a good one

Great Korean BBQ clusters in Koreatowns and strip malls, and the tells are charcoal or gas burners at every table, banchan that arrives fast and varied, and a room that's busy at 9pm. All you can eat spots are great for volume and groups; pay by the plate spots usually win on meat quality. Search for the specific style you want, and go with people. This is the least solo meal on earth.