San Maru Korean Restaurant — Restaurant in Champaign

If you’re gonna rush your customers, don’t even bother to welcome us in or take the orders. We walked in and the server (or owner) handed us the menu from behind the bar and told us we can sit wherever. The second we sat down she came to us with two glasses of water and told us kitchen closed in five minutes so we were rushed to order. Food was served after 15 minutes except for dessert. I would give a four star on food if the steamed egg doesn’t have huge pieces of egg shells in it. We spent ten minutes eating before she came back to us to ask us to pay for the food, and also asked to serve us our dessert because “they want to go home and rest”. (So why would you take us and not inform us) Right after she brought dessert up, she started asking if we need to-go box while we didn’t even finish our food half way. We took the boxes, kept eating the dessert so it didn’t get melted. At the same time I overheard her “kindly” asking the two girls from the other table to wait for their car ride outside after they finished eating. At that point as the only customer in the restaurant we felt extremely unwelcome, and the water was never refilled. My glass is completely empty (I regret from my heart to even tip 15% with service like this) We started packing the food that we didn’t get a chance to eat. The second we did that, the lady just came to our table and started picking the dishes. My dessert was not finished, she did not ask but put all the dirty plates on top of the dessert. WITHOUT ASKING IF WE WERE STILL WORKING ON IT. This whole vibe she’s giving us is that if we don’t leave in one second she would call the police on us for trespassing. We were there for about forty minutes and we had twenty minutes to eat before getting “kindly kicked out”, which is the most unique one and only experience I ever had with all the restaurants I’ve been to. All I have to say is if you allow me to dine in and order I should at least have a reasonable amount of time to finish my food without feeling rushed or...

I have been a patron at this restaurant since I moved here in 2017. I have tried almost every single dish and they are always exceeded my expectations in flavor, presentation, taste. It is the one of the few restaurants in town that still make food so fresh, with so much love and taste just like home. I dont like overly salty or greasy or too sweet. At San Maru, the food always taste just right. The dishes are very healthy too with all your daily micro and macro nutrients for example the bento box meals or beng beng chicken or tofu. When I dont feel well, Seolleong-Tang or Yook Gae Jung is one of my go to. The soup is so healing, plenty of scallions, the meat was tender, fermented kimchi is very amazing. When I crave for an explosion of flavors, I will go with bulgogi beef or beng beng chicken. The homemade fried meat dumplings and seafood pancakes are a hit at my house. My family loves the appetizers here. I just had the yellow croaker fish yesterday for the second time and it was so fresh and yummy. Overall you cannot go wrong with any dish at San Maru. It is the best the most authentic Korean restaurant in town. I...

We’ve been here twice now, once about 8 months ago and again recently. Both times the food has tasted great; it’s the best Korean food around.

However both times, for whatever reasons, our order has been forgotten. The first time 8 months ago we waited about 40 minutes before the host/server came to us to remind him our order and he said the order got lost. I’ve worked in restaurants, I get it, things happen.

However today on our second time there we received part of our order and part of it (the pork / vegetable platter) was forgotten or there was some kind of mistake. They did apologize and the food tasted great. Fortunately we had our other food (fried chicken bowl for our kid and my wife’s cold noodle soup) so it wasn’t a major issue. Today they provided us a sweet Korean rice dessert drink which I found very tasty.

All of this raises the question to why does this seem to be a persistent issue? Or am I just unlucky? Lol. I get that mistakes happen, but if it’s persistent issue there need to be some evaluation or changes.

Regardless, the food is very good and we might give...