Picnic Garden

I’ve mentioned in the past my woefully slim knowledge regarding Korean food, and Picnic Garden is part of the reason.  Korean BBQ tends to be prohibitively expensive, but Picnic Garden, one of the first places (if not THE first place) I ever had Korean BBQ, is all you can eat! and the prices are on par to what you’d pay for one portion at a regular Korean BBQ place in Koreatown.  Yes.  Seriously.  See the above?  Trays upon trays of marinated and non-marinated meats, pork belly, kalbi, chicken parts, heart, organs, pretty much if you can grill it, it’s there. 

But it isn’t all raw meat – there’s a good-sized selection of cooked items for snacking, banchan, everything you want for a regular Korean meal.  It’s totally worth it, even with the raises in prices they’ve undergone in the 10 years I’ve been going (maybe longer). 

The japchae (or glass noodles) are perfectly tasty; pickled radish, pajeon (which I didn’t like actually – it was kind of soggy), some cucumber sticks to pretend to be healthy, and some meh kimbap (Korean “sushi” or seasoned rice wrapped around pickled veggies etc.).  There’s some raw garlic too, but I throw that on the grill to flavor the grill and to eat later.  Oh! and crab, which I took a piece just to take a picture of, since they were small and hard to eat.  But I mean, really, if you wanted to pig out f’serious, you could eat lots of crab and get your money’s worth that way. 

Cooked veggies – some bokchoi, green beans – again to pretend to be healthy, and some fried mandoo (Korean dumplings), which were again, perfectly serviceable, and then some mildly spicy chicken wings, which I adore.  Yum. 

The first plate was a feeler plate of a little bit of everything (and some big raw onions also to flavor the grill and to eat later).  Big slabs of beef, kalbi, pork belly, chicken, etc. – everything tossed on and flipped as it cooked.  A waitress would wander by and snip our meat if we wanted (you can ask them not to, and they will abide).  I didn’t take pictures of every plate we ate, but eventually it boiled down to pork belly (plain), super fatty and delicious, and marined kalbi, as our top choices.  So good, and we just kept eating until we were so full we wanted to burst.  Perfect.  And the final bill?  Just under $60 total, with neither of us ordering sodas and drinking water instead, but they weren’t necessary.  The meat was juicy enough, the way we cooked it!  Perfection.  Love.  Happiness.

Yvo says: All you can eat Korean BBQ for less than the price of one meat order in K-town.  Seriously.  Can you go wrong?  You can happily pick your way through the whole buffet, trying different meats until you figure out what you like.  There’s plenty of banchan, rice, soup, and cooked foods as well.  Definitely, definitely go here, if you want to experiment and experience a lot of variety of Korean BBQ without emptying your wallet.  The food is tasty, the service is sufficient, and the price really can’t be beat. 
highly recommended because I’m a glutton