Sooda Korean BBQ — Restaurant in Vancouver

After seeing a tiktok of this place, I really wanted to try the assorted hot plate with meat, huge portions of corn cheese, and other items. When we arrived, we noticed the hip music and everyone with the plate/the sooda special. We were given a menu and told a group was leaving. The menu has their main items with a qr code to see their full menu. Our group of 6 was seated after about 15 minutes. Inside has tables mainly for groups of 2/4. We ordered the sooda special (plate with bulgogi), a full sooda box butter mayo flavor (beef tartare roll), seafood pancake, korean hashbrown, army stew, soy garlic chicken wing, and a few drinks. They had lots of fun cocktails that I have never seen before. My friends said the drinks were really good. We also got a soju bottle as it was definitely one of the more cheaper places compared to some other restaurants we had seen. The tables have a small electric hot plate in the center for the food when it comes out. The table also came with kimchi and potatoes. While the potatoes side dish can be refilled, extra kimchi costs extra. The sooda special comes with other meats, such as chicken. The meat was tasty and went well with the rice. It also came with tamago which was a surprise. It served a little more than a plate per person in my group. The army stew came out very full and had a wide variety of things, like sausage, tofu, pork belly, veggies, instant noodles, spam, fish cake, and more. The dish was enough for about a bowl per person. The beef tartare was amazing. We got a full roll which was about 16 pieces. The beef basically melts in your mouth. It is torched so it was not fully raw. The seafood pancake was also really tasty with a good amount of seafood and the perfect crunch. The korean hashbrown was definitely not a traditional item, but it was interesting. It came with spinach and dressing on top which went well with the dinner. The chicken wings were not as crunchy as we had hoped and honestly would recommend to pass on. It also came with pickled radishes. I loved it here and really enjoyed the ambiance. I really enjoyed the novelty of the dishes here and would highly recommend the sooda plate and special as the items...

The food here is completely different from what I had in Korea, and the ingredients are not good. All the dishes taste the same, rather than Korean cuisine, it's more like fast food.

Bulgogi: We ordered chicken, but they added rice cakes in it, so there was even less chicken. When I had it in Korea, cheese should be mixed with meat and corn, but the server only mixed cheese and corn, which made the cheese corn very greasy. The taste of the fried chicken is completely different from what I had in Korea and not spicy at all.

Sweet Rib with cheese: Very little meat, tastes like chicken, but with bones.

Ju Sam: Same taste, but the biggest problem is there's very little portion inside and the meat is not fresh.

Seafood pancake: This is the worst seafood pancake I've ever had in my life. It can't even be called a seafood pancake because there's no real seafood inside. Seafood pancake should have scallions, shrimp, squid, etc., but this is just a lump of flour cake with very little seasoning and ingredients. The menu says it's super crispy, but it was soft when we ate it. I think they used premade products and cooked them again. Finally, because the taste was so bad, we took one bite and returned the dish.

Sooda Fries: The sauce inside and the taste of the fries don't blend at all. The ingredients used are the same as those in other dishes on the menu: beef, corn, onion. I think all their dishes are made with a few ingredients. The fries themselves are not well fried and not crispy at all. I thought how bad could fries be, but the fries from this place are...

The service was really great, they had some of the most friendly waitresses I’ve seen in Vancouver. The atmosphere was nice too.

However, the food was disappointing. This was the first time I went to the Gastown location, and I’ve never been to the main store in Burnaby so I couldn’t make any comparison.

We ordered a single serving Dakgalbi and a Jusam. The Jusam only came with two pretty small tiger prawns and quite few small baby octopuses that were quite hard to find. The pork felt a little too mushy but the taste was not bad. The prawns were overcooked. The octopuses were quite bad, I’m not sure if they were overcooked, undercooked, or just not fresh, the texture didn’t feel like octopus at all, it really felt like I was biting a much softer version of tteokboki (rice cakes). The other dish, the Dakgalbi was not bad, but a little oily. Also, another thing that I was a little surprised about was that we only got 2 side dishes, a seaweed salad and a dish that I wasn’t sure was kimchi or just cabbage salad, which were less than what most Korean restaurants would offer.

Before we left, we did let the waitress know the issue, and she seemed concerned and said she’d talk to the chef. Overall, I would give the service a 10/10, but only maybe 6/10 for the food, mainly because of the seafood. The restaurant is definitely not considered bad, but I think I just expected something a little better for that price and for the good things I’ve...