Korean BBQ - Kim's

L picked Kim's Restaurant for the Sunday Night Dinner Club this month. And you know, well, it's the best Korean BBQ in all of Philly (yes, I even think so), so I was totally stoked. So what if it's in a dodgey neighborhood? Don't worry, there's security cameras in their parking lot, so it can't be so bad! There were supposed to be 10 of us, so they had prepped two tables for us, and all the banchan was already laid out. Score. We started eating it right away. I do have to say, the quality of banchan is a pretty good sign of whether a Korean place is good or not, and really, their banchan is pretty damn good. Not everything is great, but their regular kimchi is great, and that's a pretty good litmus test.




So yes, we came here to eat Korean BBQ. You cook it yourself, people. So don't come here expecting to be pampered. And well, it is a Korean restaurant, so certainly, you know the service is going to suck. So just go in knowing this, and you'll have a good time. There ended up being 7 of us, so we ended up getting 2 orders of the spicy kalbi and 1 order of the regular kalbi. Our waitress recommended that we get 4 in total, but I didn't think we needed to do that. And in the end, we didn't need to. So even though it says spicy kalbi, it really isn't that spicy. And it's definitely a bit different than the regular one, but trust me, it's good in its own way, and not really spicy at all. Yes, it certainly looks spicy (it's totally bright red), but it doesn't taste that spicy at all. So get it. Trust me!

I ended up being the Korean food expert (haha) of the group, so I also ended up cooking the meat on my grill. We had two grills going. And you cook the meat over real wood coals. This is real Korean BBQ folks. And yes there is a fancy Korean BBQ stink air intake system over your table, but don't even believe for a minute that you won't have Korean BBQ stench reeking out of every pore of your body after this. You just will. There's no getting around it.



In all my having to cook the meat glory, I totally forgot to take photos. Once I remembered, it was pretty much too late. That's why there's only this gross picture of the leftover bones from the spicy kalbi and L cooking the last few little bits of meat on the other grill. Oops, my bad. We did also order the haemul pajeon (seafood pancake) and the gochu pajeon (pepper pancake) as appetizers. As usual, the haemul pajeon rocked, and the gochu pajeon, well, it was good, but much spicier than expected!

The service.... well, it was actually particularly bad. Haha. We asked for refills on the banchan, and that took forever. And they didn't give us everything that we wanted. We barely ever had any water on the table. Even when we kept asking. And we had to ask for rice like a half a dozen times. And when we finally got our rice, so much of the meat had already been eaten. But perhaps the charm of a Korean restaurant is that the bad service is part of the whole experience? No matter what though, the food is good, and you will leave full and happy and stinking like cooked meat.

Kim's Restaurant
5955 N. Fifth St.

215-927-4550