Sae Ma Eul BBQ | Sri Petaling — Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur

Korean restaurant that offers BBQ Buffet, Korean Ala Carte Meals, Ala Carte BBQ, Snacks, etc. Prices below not yet include Service Charges and Tax

Atmosphere: 4.25🌟 There's outside and inside seats. Inside seats usually the left side one is not open during non peak hours. They have smoke exhaust but they may not turn it on when there's less than 2-3 tables of customers. This may end up making things very smoky. This has changed recently for the better.

Service: 4.5🌟 Service is friendly and attentive but the lady boss can be quite unfriendly looking honestly. A lot rules are setup for BBQ Buffet which can be good and bad at the same time. At least there's clarity I guess. You can request to change the pan when it gets too dirty. Usually the charcoal can last 1.5 to 2 hours but sometimes it may only last 1 hour or less so you can request to add.

Food: BBQ Buffet 4.25🌟 There's spicy/soy sauce marinated chicken and pork. There's also pork belly cuts. My personal favorite is spicy chicken (thigh meat). Limited to 4 meat cuts at a time but can refill unlimited through ordering (press bell). Drinks are self refill and can also self take soup. There's also 1 ice cream potong per person. My other personal likes here are their side dishes. There's a special 3 sides on a long tray special (no refill) per person. There are up to 10+ types of side dishes (unlimited refill). I believe due to hygiene concern, you need to take (reuse) any of the 6 empty side dishes plates and bring it to the side dish area and the staff will help refill. Side dish varieties have improved and became one of the best. Priced at Rm 38++

Food (Ala Carte): Kimbap 3.75 🌟 About 8 varieties to choose from and personally I like the Spicy Fish Sticks and Spicy Pork ones. 2 rows of them thick with ingredients (than rice). Suitable for take away snacks or a meal (for small eaters). Priced at Rm 20++ for Fish/Odeng Kimbab

Food (Ala Carte BBQ Add On): Steam Egg 3.5 🌟, BBQ Cheese 2.25 🌟 Steam Egg is nice with crunchy veggies and not overly burnt. BBQ cheese doesn't have much flavor but is very good for Instagram pictures as you can pull it very long and wrap around your BBQ meat nicely. However, personally I doubt I'll order it again. Egg is priced at Rm 10++ and Cheese Rm 15++

Food (Meal): Glass Noodle 3.5 🌟, Jajang Noodle 3 🌟, Tteobokki Glass Noodle 3.5 🌟 Glass Noodle is what I like, thick and springy and tastes pretty good. Jajang mien is a bit on the softer side for my taste but the sauce is decent. Meals come with 3 side dishes in a long tray.

Drinks: Grape Drink 3.25🌟 Sweet and kinda nice....

What happened to this place!? It used to be somewhat good but now it's just horrible! What happened to the Chinese staffs!? Last time i was here there were 2 or 3 Chinese staffs and now there is none. By far they are the most reliable people of this restaurant but they are just gone now. The service was terrible and food is worse than before. I assume all staffs are Myanmarese judging by the language they speak to each other, some things were explained to us wrongly and it's very confusing because we don't know what is/are the correct rule(s). This is not the first time they explained the wrong rules to us, last time they did the same thing but then one of the chinese staff helped us in learning the correct rules. I've been here a few times already and every time i ask to see the boss of the restaurant they always tell me she is not here. What is this person doing? I see many problems in this restaurant, bad rules, untrained staff, and they want to bribe us into giving them 5 stars on google for 1 can of soda? Are you serious? And apparently, when you do your 5 🌟 review but if there is a bug on Google that doesn't show your review, you cannot get the free soda!? That's just wasting customers' time

How much this restaurant has fallen

And another note to people reading this: if you see any 5 🌟 reviews for this, 90% chance that the more recent ones are fake. why? Because those reviews are bribed from...

They have two dining areas which makes it a big restaurant (the size of two shoplot). However, ventilation is so bad and it makes you feel like you are at Genting Highlands, smoke is literally at your face and worse, hot and oily.

I requested several times, for them to switch on the air-cond. They responded "okay" every time I asked so, but yet no action taken. The air-cond was still off when I finished my meal and left the restaurant.

Tables are oily and stinky, unsure whether they clean it properly. Worse, they put your cutlery on the table. Please, at the very least, put it on a plate, not throwing it on the oily table.

They do provide a little calling machine (the little button to call for service as shown in the photo). However, as expected, it is merely a decoration. Please remove it if you have no intention to respond to the calling.

The so called "unlimited buffet", but they kinda control the frequency of serving. I requested for pork set, waited for 30mins, got nothing. I then walked to the kitchen and asked for the pork set. Again, waited for 20mins and finally they served the set. Wasted nearly 50mins to get a set of pork and they set the dining time for buffet to be 1 hour 30mins. To me, this is LIMITED, not unlimited.

Overall, they destroyed Sae Ma Eul reputation. I will never visit any Sae Ma Eul after this. We can easily get another Korean BBQ that are better /...