K- ROK Korean BBQ & Karaoke Soju Cocktail Bar — Restaurant in Grand Rapids

This place is unequivocally, without hyperbole, the absolute worst Korean bbq restaurant I've ever been to, and possibly the worst restaurant experience I've ever had. You can tell that the owner tries to take every possible shortcut with regards to food, service, and ambiance. Let's start with everything that's wrong with the food. I doubt the owner/chefs has ever been to a real Kbbq restaurant. It's as if they eavesdropped a conversation about Kbbq and simply designed the menu based off that one, second-hand experience. Their bonchan only consisted of 3. THREE. items; kongnamool (beansprouts), cabbage kimchi, and oi muchim (spicy pickled cucumber). Normally, at any real Korean restaurant, we would have at least 10 varieties of bonchon. Almost laughably, the diversity of the bonchon was not the saddest part. I swear the staff mistook us as hamsters because they gave us 1 tbsp of the kongnamool, 2 cabbage leaves, and 3 pieces of cucumber. We had a party of 4. Naturally, we asked for more bonchan within 5 seconds as everything was devoured in 1 bite. On the topic of portion sizes, this restaurant had no concept of scaling their meats to the number of people in the party. Our party of 4 decided to do the all-you-can-eat option, which was 35$ per person. They portion each plate of meat for 2 people, regardless of how many people are eating. The party of 2 behind us, and the party of 6 adjacent to us received the same amount of food as we did. A 6yo child could tell you that more people will eat more food. It doesn’t take much thinking to realize how the decision to not scale your portions might be a problem. The conclusion must be that the manager/owner has either worse critical thinking skills than a 6yo or they are intentionally doing this to cut costs. To be CLEAR, this wouldn’t be a problem if you could order as many plates as your party required. However, we were only allowed to order 3 plates of meat at a time and could not order our next round until we had cooked AND eaten the three plates. While ordering 3 plates at a time is not out of the ordinary for Kbbq restaurants, limiting us to ordering the next round only AFTER we had finished our previous round is unheard of. This led to incredibly long downtime between rounds. After 2 hours and 40 minutes we had only managed to finish 8 rounds and left the restaurant HUNGRY. Imagine going to an ALL YOU CAN EAT and leaving hungry. If the service had been prompt, this might have not been such an issue. After the 3rd round, we timed the amount of time it took between ordering the round and the time we were served. They averaged 16 minutes. 16 minutes to bring out 3 small plates of meat. Therefore, in one hour, you only get 4 rounds of food. Absolutely unacceptable for an AYCE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN 2 PEOPLE, because again they give you the same portion size no matter your party size. I have never had a Kbbq experience where the plates came out in over 5 minutes. Here are a couple of theories as to why service would be so slow:

1. The servers are incompetent/inefficient. I’m not saying they’re not hard workers. The staff were all working hard and not lazing around. But being incompetent and hard working aren’t mutually exclusive. You can try your best but just do a poor job. The primary reason I suspect the servers are inefficient is that any other Kbbq place would have 1/3 the workers for the same number of tables with faster service times. K ROK had 4-5 servers for 11 tables. They aren’t even cooking the meat for us which some Kbbq places do. Therefore, I have to conclude that either they’re new and don’t know what they’re doing or are just incompetent.
2. Poor dinner prep/inexperienced cooks/not enough cooks. How else would scooping 3oz of beef bulgogi and slicing 4 strips of pork belly take 16 minutes to get out of the kitchen? Even if they had only 1 person working in the kitchen, slicing a plate of chadolbaegi or samgyupsal should take SECONDS, not minutes.

To be...

Sat down for dinner around 8:30pm with my girlfriend, and three other tables were present. A total of 10 people including us. Host asked if we wanted the bbq, gave us the menus, and did a round while we looked. I’ve never been to a KBBQ place, but have seen videos and it looks delicious. When our host dropped waters off a few minutes later, I asked “So how does it work? This is our first time.” To which he replied “one minute,” and disappeared into the back. Our server then shows up after ten minutes. I asked the same question. She recommended the all-you-can-eat, but before she could explain she fell into a coughing fit and dismissed herself. She never came back. Either her employer had her work when they knew she was sick, or she really didn’t want to explain how to grill meat for the twentieth time that day, as we heard her say “I can’t do this. I shouldn’t be here right now.”

She walked out after that.

So we’re then greeted by a third person. The kindest so far. An older woman who we were able to snag a kitchen menu from. We ordered the spicy pork dumplings (5 for $10.) They’re fried crispy and served with a nice soy-style sauce.

Before the dumplings hit the table however, we are introduced to our fourth person. An emergency server who probably should’ve been there instead of our unwell second server. He seemed geared up to help us, but by this time we’ve already decided to cut our losses and find dinner elsewhere. We parsed through the five dumplings. They were spicier than I expected, in a good way!

After handing $15 to our newest server at the bar, we ended up walking down the street to Uccellos, and had an amazing dinner. Service was stellar!

I hope this was an off night for K Rok, but as our time in this city is limited, we won’t be returning, nor recommending this to anyone else. At the end of the day, the $15 we paid wasn’t for the dumplings, it was the price to leave. Thanks for...

We were so excited to have this Kareoke Room experience. First impression- not impressed. I called a month ago to make a reservation, they only asked for my name and said I was good to go. I tried to call the day of to confirm and was told “they were too busy” for her to check the system and verify my reservation, but they’d call me if there was a problem despite taking no information. We showed up at 9pm and the women at the bar was laughing at us because they didn’t have a room available until 9:30 and it kind of just felt like she thought she was funny and we were stupid- but clearly we were first time customers and were not aware- I spoke on the phone with somebody twice and at no point was I told it wasn’t available until 9:30 or that I needed to make a reservation online- neither of these facts would have been an issue for us. I spoke with a male who spoke like he was a manager or potentially the owner maybe- blamed having to fire people and offered us a round of shots (which they never brought us- not going to remind you of something you offered us without asking for anything, we were just confused!! Not to mention thrown off by the unprofessional woman at the bar laughing at me…. Plus the lack of communication despite making two phone calls- I did try to check their website on google but the link isn’t working!!) We returned at 9:30, had a great time because we are a pretty fun group, but kinda felt like we coulda just done this ourselves and saved $350. Then we go to leave and in less than 15 minutes somebody stole our friend’s phone from the girls bathroom- they had no security and apparently people were walking in off the street to use the bathroom despite their customer only policy- they just clearly can’t actually adhere to that. Just kinda not at all what we expected and will likely not return after...