Little Korea BBQ, New Orleans, LA Report #207

I loved having Japanese BBQ at Gyu-Kaku, so I figured I’d give the Korean version a try.  I’ve actually never had Korean food.  A guy I used to work with, whose mother is Korean, recommended this place.

If you want to grill your own food you can sit at a grill table, but you may have other folks sharing the table with you.  And you know you’re in a high class place when they have metal chopsticks!  I loved the copper colored exhaust fans that you could pull down over the grill to suck away the smoke.

When it comes to the BBQ aspect of the menu you can either order prepared meat dishes, or raw, marinated/seasoned meats to grill yourself.  Since we didn’t know what the hell we were doing we decided to try both.  We ordered the KFC Korean fried chicken wings with a spicy glaze, and the Baked Corn Cheese for appetizers.  For entrées we went with the Spicy Ox-tail Stew, the La Gal Bi, which was cooked, marinated short ribs, and a half pound of the raw, garlic pork belly to grill ourselves.

The food!

The chicken wings were very good.  Nice and tender and the glaze was yummy.

Next, they bring out an array of small side dishes, called Banchan, to go with your meal.  You don’t order them or chose which ones you want.  They do it for you.  They’re the six small dishes in the second picture above.  The top row from the left were some kind of squash, then cucumbers, then lettuce with a sauce I couldn’t pronounce.  The bottom row was kimchi, something they called fish cakes, and finally some pickled bean sprouts.  Under those are three sauces.  One was a peanut sauce.  The other two I couldn’t remember or pronounce.  Everything was pretty good!

The Baked Corn Cheese was just that.  A platter of baked corn with Mozzarella cheese melted on top.  Nothing really to say about this.  If you like corn and cheese, you’ll like this.

The large pic to the right is the garlic pork belly being grilled expertly by my dining partner.  If you want to cut it up before or after it’s cooked, they give a scissors instead of a knife.  It was delicious.

We enjoyed the cooked beef dish and the oxtail stew.  The stew came out in a little pot, cooked in a broth that had a kind of sweet flavor I didn’t care for too much, so I took the oxtails out and ate them over rice.  There were three nice size oxtails in the dish. Very tender.  I didn’t recognize all the veggies in the pot, including the two in the last picture.  I asked my waiter what they were.  He thought for a bit and said they were Korean beets.  By the way, he wasn’t Korean!  I ate one and it tasted like a date, which would explain the sweet taste of the broth.

Finally, don’t ask for a dessert menu.  They don’t serve dessert.  When I asked my waiter told us they used to, but stopped.

We enjoyed this place.  I recommend it!

2240 Magazine St. #103, New Orleans, LA  70130  Ph: 504-821-5006

Blaine 6-14-2019