Waiting for the moment…

This place…

…opened its doors not too long ago, occupying the shoplot where this used to be before and this one before it. I did see some favourable reviews from my friends on Facebook and seeing that my girl (and the mum) are so into anything and everything Korean, I was waiting for the moment to take them here.

Well, it’s the school holidays right now so with a lot more time on our hands, we dropped by the place for dinner on Tuesday evening. Business hours are from 6.30 p.m. onwards, closed on Mondays, but we got there a little after 6.00 and to our delight, they were already open…

…and of course, we were the first and the only people around. However, it did not take very long before the place was turned into a hive of activity as people started flocking in…

…a number of them in big groups, there to celebrate a birthday and that was very good considering it was a weekday night. If it is going to be like this every night or on most nights, at least, I am pretty sure it will not share the same fate as the two that were here before.

I do not know why the regular price per head for their eat-all-you-can buffet has been reduced to RM37.90…

…and for senior citizens like my missus and I, there is a special concession of only RM6.00 so I only had to pay RM31.90 for each of the two of us. Ah well!!! I guess something is better than nothing, right?

I don’t know who owns the place…

…or whether the very nice and friendly young boy and two girls running the show are, in fact, the owners or not. One of the girls is proficient in English and spoke it very fluently while the other two seemed more comfortable with Mandarin instead.

As soon as we were seated, we were served one big tumbler of ice-cold brown rice tea and that was quite enough for us throughout the whole dinner but there is free flow of water and cordials that one can help oneself to.

I would not say that they had a lot for their buffet spread – the cooked selections…

…but anyway, I did not want to take a lot from there…

…since it’s a BBQ place so I would much rather go for the meat and stuff to barbecue and enjoy.

The fried rice was very nice and I must say that I was rather pleased it wasn’t kimchi fried rice as I am not into that. I loved the japchae (the Korean fried glass noodles) and the pajun (Korean pancake) was nice too. You can blame it on my poor eyesight but I thought that was sotong (squid) in kimchi but actually, they were tteok, Korean rice cakes which were all right but a little chewy or rubbery.

On the other side…

…they had these eggs…

…that were nothing very special actually. They looked like hardboiled eggs with a bit of mayo and tomato sauce on top but the egg lover that I am, I just couldn’t resist it and yes, I thought they were good as well. I did try the kimbap/gimbap (Korean sushi) but they did not get me all that excited. Of course I did not take anything from those plates in front – look at all that kimchi! – but my girl loved the buchu kimchi (garlic chives kimchi), the one at the very end.

I had quite a lot of the pork and beef…

…that I wrapped in the lettuce provided, once cooked, adding the garlic slices and the dip of my choice…

…and personally, I preferred that to the seasoned meat…

…that the ladies said was nicer. Incidentally, you can request for a change of the hot metal plate if it gets too dirty from all that grilling – the lady did ask us but we said we were fine with it.

I did like the dak bulgogi…

…and the (beef) bulgogi…

…though and those were the only words I could read on their labels all over – the rest were all in Mandarin and though I could converse communicatively in the language, I cannot read it…except for one character, 三 , and I could tell from it that that would be the three-layer pork or pork belly.

There were prawns…

…too but we only had one round of those as we did not really fancy the chore of removing the shell and there was fish as well, what looked like kembong or one of those, but we did not have any.

For dessert, there was a choice of at least six flavours of ice cream, fruits. agar-agar (jelly) and this cake…

…that I thought was matcha cheese but when I tried, there was no taste of green tea which I am not a fan of and I thought it was very nice with the fragrance of butter and cheese.

I was amazed by the sight of all those people stacking all the food on their plates – I guess they would be able to finish all of it or they would have to pay a surcharge on leftovers. On our part, being old, my missus and I did not eat all that much actually and my girl has always been a small eater and I do wish the whole time that they had those exhaust pumps that would suck out all the fumes so we would not leave the place smelling of all that meat that we had on the grill.

Nevertheless, we had a delightful dinner and enjoyed it a lot so the next opportunity we get, we certainly would have no second thoughts about going back there again.

DAKSEMARI KOREAN BBQ (2.287332, 111.826574) is located at No. 8, Jalan Chew Geok Lin (formerly Old Street) that leads straight to the Tua Pek Kong 7-storey Pagoda Temple.