Taegukgi Korean BBQ House is located next to Zion Market. We visited back when it first opened, but haven’t had a chance to return again until recently.
While we haven’t dined here in a while, we have been observing all the changes they made to the restaurant since their initial opening. They’ve added an outdoor cafe that serves simple Korean dishes and desserts, more menu items, and their impossible to miss signage (at night the white LED lights keep running down it, giving it almost a club-like feel).
We were in the mood for All You Can Eat BBQ and decided to have dinner here with friends. Despite arriving for an early dinner, the place was already quite full. They told us the wait would be about 45 minutes, but luckily it only ended up being about 20 minutes.
When we arrived at our table, all the complimentary banchan dishes were already on the table, along with drinking water and dipping sauces.
It was a little hard to take pictures of all the individual dishes since they were situated around the grill. I took a couple of quick photos to give you an idea. There were 10 dishes if you include the salad.
As soon as we sat down, they also immediately brought over some complimentary brisket. This is something they did on our initial visit too.
You have two choices for AYCE: there is an original menu and a premium menu that has a few extra options. We decided to stick to the original one.
You are able to start with four meats and when you finish those, you can continue ordering, up to four at a time. There is a two hour eating limit.
In addition to the raw meats, you can also order their steamed egg and bean paste stew. We chose to get the steamed egg. I thought it was a little under-seasoned and not as silky as the one at Manna.
Since raw meat isn’t really the most appetizing thing to look at, I’ll just show a few photos of what we ordered.
We ended up doing about 4 rounds total. When I was leaving the restaurant, I saw this at another table, which looks really interesting.
Overall, we had a pretty good time here, much like our first visit. While the meat quality isn’t quite as good as Manna, it’s a good variety for the price. It didn’t take long for additional orders of meat to come and they also changed out our grill several times.
If you come here for dinner on the weekends, you can go to the cafe outside and redeem a free fish-shaped red bean waffle (basically the Japanese Taiyaki) with proof of dinner receipt.
Each person was able to get one. It was a nice little treat to end the night.
I also spotted a pretty nice looking selection of macaron ice cream sandwiches. I’ll have to come back another time to try them.
Taegukgi Korean BBQ House
7655 CLAIREMONT MESA BLVD
SAN DIEGO, CA 92111
https://www.tggsd.com/
