Gen Korean BBQ House — Restaurant in Fullerton

This was my second bad experience with this place. I tried giving it the benefit of the doubt, but this location is much worse than the others I visited. Tonight we were celebrating and had a party of twelve, more than half were little kids. I understand that kids under 50" are at a reduced rate. Four of the kids in our party were under fifty inches, one of the was significantly under that height, the child might have even been under 40".

However, our waiter marked us for 12 adults. He didn't check their heights, and his shift ended in the middle of our meal, so when we got the check, he wasn't there to verify. Another parent complained he was rude to her because she asked him for a clean plate; our plates were greasy when we arrived at the table. The younger kids were taken home because they were getting restless, because our food took so long to receive and one of the kids refused to eat anything besides a bowl of white rice.

In the two hours we were there, I only ordered twice, the first meats they brought were not my order, they delivered ours to the wrong people and brought us things we didn't order. Then after our waiter changed, it took forever to flag our new server down to get things like water and to order again. They took so long bringing out the meat that they made more mistakes and brought us double of things that we didn't order again, which we addressed with the waitress...and then when we got our check, we were charged for 12 adults, and the manager was saying if wanted to be charged for children, she would have to check the security cameras to see their heights when we came in.

In the end, because the kids weren't there to verify the height, they reduced our bill by two adults. But that ended up being inconvenient too, since we were supposed to have separate checks we all had at least one child. In the end, we figured it out amongst ourselves. But they were taking so long to pick up the check that I walked it to the register. And when I got back, they sent someone to the table to ask if we were going to pay our bill any time soon. It was just unpleasant. They made an actual mistake, but instead of fixing it, they made us feel like we were trying to cheat them.

Overall, it wasn't the best experience. It was extremely smokey in there too, and usually the good Korean bbqs have great ventilation fans so you don't leave there smelling like you were saving pigs from a barn fire. This was smokey like an old bar. The kimchi was not good. The cucumber kimchi had a strong taste of black pepper (growing up on traditional Korean kimchi and my long experience of kimchi making- this place had it wrong). The meat was inconsistent. Unfortunately, this will be my last visit to this location, maybe to this restaurant chain in general, we're were celebrating, but the restaurant killed the mood.

Southern California has a very good selection of Korean BBQ. The location in Tustin was good, but I think this ruined all...

TL;DR: I waited over 20 minutes for unorganized staff to figure out what happened to my prepaid online order.

Ordered online from the to go menu on their website. It was easy to use and had clear descriptions for frozen meat quantities. The trouble started when I went to pick up my food.

The confirmation email said my order would be ready for pickup at 5 pm. I arrived at 5 pm and notified the staff that I was here for picking up my food. A few other customers were waiting for their online order, and too many of us were inside so they told us all to wait outside and they would come to us when they had our order.

I waited outside for 20 minutes with no one coming outside to notify us of anything, it seems they forgot about us entirely and were too busy dealing with customers who are dining in.

I went back to ask them what’s going on. I told the employees I have waited for 20 minutes and my order was supposed to be ready by 5 pm.

One of the employees told me they accidentally gave my order to another customer. I don’t understand how staff could be so careless to mistakenly give another customer someone else’s food. They said they will remake my order and we will have to wait until they do that. Around 10 minutes later, they came with a bag of food but the food was not what I ordered at all, and under a different name. I told them this is not my order and I showed them the email confirmation.

Next, they tell me my order was never in their online ordering system because they can’t find the order, contradictory to the excuse they gave me earlier. I show them my confirmation email and they still cannot find it. Finally, another employee comes with my food order (everything was correct and under the right name). They gave us complementary ice cream for the trouble, but I still felt the need to write this review.

The highly unorganized experience I had with this online ordering is upsetting and I am trying to be understanding given the current situations occurring. If this is a common experience here, they should reorganize how they handle online orders. There was no distinct and separate line for online orders (many other restaurants do that to be more organized), and there is no clear communication among the staff from what...

My wife and I have been frequent visitors of Gen for many years now, visiting multiple locations from Corona, Rancho Cucamonga and Cerritos.

Unfortunately this Fullerton location needs a lot of improvement with their staff because it was mind boggling how poor of an attitude they were displaying, borderline unprofessional. We had two people from our party of five that had food allergies with pineapple and the paprika. We asked instead of sharing one burner for our party of if they could accommodate us with two tables and were told those are only for groups of seven. For it being 1pm on a Wednesday it was slow with not a lot of customers. After a talk with the manager they were able to make the accommodation for us, we certainly felt we were going to find another location to celebrate our family member's birthday at due to the difficulty they were giving us.

Our server Zay was interesting, first impression of him was good but we quickly noticed how odd his antics were. He was overbearing and intrusive and we didn't feel comfortable talking to him. When our drinks arrive he placed them all at the edge of the table and quickly left, I had to properly serve our drinks. Once we ordered our food we had issues getting the requested meat and sides brought to our table, we were impressed how quickly everything was brought out but it was a pain to remind them for the requested sizes of rice. There was no mention if they were out and were making more but he acknowledged our request and seemed to focus on other tasks. We had the same issue for our drinks, when he felt like refilling he would again leave drinks at the end of the table instead of bring it to the person ordering.

There were other issues with Zay but this has been long enough. If you have options on were to spend your money I would suggest you consider those options. We left feeling this location had issues that goes far beyond the servers and far into management to allow this. We regretted not being turned away so we could have avoided this experience, it does tarnish our view on...