Seoul Kitchen Birmingham — Restaurant in Birmingham

I have been to every single Korean food restaurant in Birmingham and this one was my least favourite and it's not even close. We got two bbq meats (spicy pork and beef brisket) kimchi jeon, and complimentary sides to the bbq. Both the meats had good texture which is about the only positive thing I can say about this. "Spicy" pork? Yeah right. The marinade was almost non-existent. What makes it Korean or spicy? Who knows. In most Korean places you can eat the meat without the extra sauce they give you and still feel the sweet spicy flavor but here if that's what you were looking for you will taste close to nothing without the extra sauce provided. Kimchi pancake - flavorless. Absolutely flavorless. Weird cause we got kimchi as a side and it packed a lot of flavor. Soy sauce they provide is good, dipped some beef in it and it was tasty.

Place is fine, I appreciate the service ring on each table. Staff is trying their best although a bit clumsy. I also commend for changing the grills :).

One star overall because the prices are so abhorrent compared to the rest of the korean restaurants you'd think they'd serve better quality. It's solely to express my extreme disappointment with how of a let-down this experience was. My partner and I are big fans of Korean food and we were looking forward to this place a lot. Dumbest thing of them all? We didn't even get any chopsticks. Guess cause we're not Asian? Very weird to give chopsticks to everyone in the restaurant but not to us. Usually they bring you both forks and chopsticks or you can ask for forks but no Asian restaurant I've ever been in gives fork as a primary option. I didn't say anything cause I was just mentally checked out at that point. Please try and pick up thin beef brisket with a fork and see how fun it is. Very weird experience. Not coming back if it's up to me. I recommend you save yourself the money and just...

Decent food, shocking service.

Placed our drink orders but when one of our party saw the peach Soju was only 3%, she thought £15 was a rip-off so decided not to have it. The bottled was unopened so she asked the waitress to take it off, we'll leave it. The waitress seemed to get the hump about this for some reason and had quite the attitude.

Starters were delicious. Then the mains arrived for the BBQ. Mixed mushrooms, prawns and a few other bits arrived which we cooked and ate, then sat there for about 15 minutes waiting for the set A platter to arrive. Waiter comes over, turns our grill off and starts to take things away. We asked him where our meat was and he said we didn't order any. We clearly saw her write down set A on the ticket.

When the meat arrived, we turned the grill up to max to heat it up. The heat ranges from 1 to 8 bars on the control. We were told to turn it down when we cook the food because of the smoke, which is fine, but nothing specific. We turned it down to 5 to cook some meats and a few minutes later, a different waitress storms over to us and says "your grill too hot", leans across us while we were eating and turned it down further. Had they said to keep it below a certain level then we would have!

Then some more starters arrived that we didn't actually order.. but we kept them as they were nice.

We finally got to cooking our rib-eye steak. Before this we cooked some belly pork so there was a nice bit of fat to cook the steak in. We cooked one side, then the waiter walks over, lifts the grill up and sticks a clean one on! Nobody said this would happen, nor were we asked. He just said "grill too dirty" so we had to wait for this new grill to heat up with a half-cooked steak sat there.

We all enjoyed the food, but the service totally ruined it for us. I was so angry by the time we left. Get your service up to scratch and explain things to...

My friends and I booked a table for dinner lastnight at Seoul Kitchen, it was my second time dining at the restaurant and went in with great expectations. The food was great, nothing shy of amazing!

The worst thing about the night was the service, we waited over 20 minutes for our first drink and had to ask multiple times for our bill.

When paying, a blonde lady who was working there claimed that the service charge on the receipt was a company policy and we had to pay it. We hadn’t been told this before we dined, but we also knew that this was a load of rubbish. I explained to her that legally I don’t have to if I’m not satisfied with the service, to which she said there was nothing she could do to remove it, when her payment machine allows you to enter your own amount! We asked to see evidence of their company policy, she said she didn’t know it. We asked to speak to management, she said they were in a meeting at 8pm, laughable. She then gave us a piece of paper with their VAT number saying that if we pay the service charge, we can claim it back. Again, laughable.

I asked to speak to a different member of staff and she claimed they were all new staff and in training, when I already recognised one of the staff from my previous visit. I took it upon myself to speak to another staff member who told me there WAS a manager there.

Luckily we were able to get the fee refunded, but the management couldn’t have cared less about his staffs unprofessionalism. It’s sad to say that I definitely won’t be returning, and would advise everyone I know...