ABSteak by Chef Akira Back — Restaurant in Los Angeles

Service: Our waiter Eric was incredibly friendly and had the odd ability to make me feel like he'd been serving me at the restaurant for years like an old friend. One thing that sticks out the the precision and efficiency of the service flow. The food was not rushed out all together like a Friday traffic jam on the 405 but neither did we wait on food from the kitchen for any period of time. Everything was served at the perfect pace and the perfect time. This bodes well as I'm certain this place will become more and more populated as word gets around and turning tables quickly, while making people feel well served and comfortable will be paramount to success. Since it was my first time there, I subtly tested our waiter Eric by casually placing my chopsticks randomly on the table away from the holder, using the wrong utensils and emptying my drink and placing it uncomfortably out of reach for myself. Eric quickly helped organize my utensils and non verbally and unintrusively suggested the fork or the spoon when it was most appropriate for the course I was consuming. He managed to take care of all the table service while not interrupting the actual meal. Steaks are cooked at the table by Eric, who presented the food and made sure to not be in the way of any photos of the food. Eric quietly seared each order, gave its proper respect with the flame and rested the steak before portioning the meat into shareable and more manageable sizes.

Food: Besides the regular menu, they had a special in season branzino dish as well as an extremely refreshing yellowtail ceviche that I want to say had some yuzu in it.

Bread course included 2 different types of table rolls and a kimchee butter. Ok, before your brain starts to process that, you need to know that the butter was absolutely beautiful with a soft, smooth kiss of a kimchee essence. It does not by any means clobber you over the head with any harsh salt, spice or pungent flavorings.

The “BO SSAM” featured a 24 hour sous vide pork belly, with an apple kimchee (again, toss that harsh idea of kimchee out the window) an an XO sauce. I neglected to ask if the XO sauce was house made, but I suspect it was. It tasted like the quality of the dried scallops and umami bomb ingredients associated with XO were much nicer than some of the jarred stuff many restaurants tend to utilize. The XO was gently added and didn't overshadow the pork belly.

The Kimchee fried rice was more along the lines of traditional flavors of kimchee, really really good kimchee... It had heat and depth without any sharp acidic tones.

Onto the star of the show...the beef. There are no bad choices here. AB Steak offers several varieties of dry aged beef as well as prime and Wagyu beef. Ab Steak seems to source their wagyu out of Australia as well as one of the several popular wagyu farms out of Oregon, forgoing the popular Snake Rivers Farms and Double R Ranch Wagyu popular with many high end restaurants and competition bbq teams . They do offer A5 wagyu from various prefectures of Japan but my personal preference for the dollar is American wagyu. Depending on the breeding, American Wagyu can offer a deeper flavor and doesn't carry the cost of a pure bred and imported wagyu from Japan. And to be honest, if you're dining out and having wine, sake or even soda, the subtle differences become much more of a grey line.

One of the more interesting stars of the show is the Camembert cheese dry aged ribeye. Camembert generally carries a similar process and flavoring to aged beef and it certainly plays well here.

The meat is presented with 3 different flake salts all extremely subtle with it's flavoring. Eric had suggested to cut the meat into smaller sections and play with each salt individually. Ultimately I ended up using the truffle salt with a touch of the black garlic salt. The kimchee salt was also quite complimentary to each cut of meat.

Dessert was not an afterthought and was well conceived and complimentary. Thank you Chef Back, staff and our...

Hands down, the best best Korean Barbecue locally and even globally, if not one of the top 1%. It is a la carte so be ready to splurg. It will cost you an arm and leg but worth every penny. All of their stuff was super on point, even their side dishes. Consistently it was all good. Mushroom fries was really good, don’t know what fat they used to fry it but ‘twas flavorful and well fried with the right amount of batter. Dry aged rib eye was really good. Tried the flower short rib, you’ll love it. The signature ab rib was definitely a stand out. Not all signature dishes really say signature, but they really mean it. The yukhae was super on point as well as it was perfectly mixed and seasoned, this one was presented and mixed in front of you. I wish I could have tried all their items and from what I can tell, you most likely can blindfold yourself and choose any items off of their menu and it would be on point. I didn’t realize their flag ship had Michelin but before guessing it I had guessed they would/should be getting either the James Beard or a Michelin star soon. Get ready to give up your wallets when coming here. Also their golden barely soju that was picked out by whoever was in charge was a great choice. This should be the national Korean drink instead of your typical soju. When people think of soju, this should be it. The best way to put it is a stronger version of a sake. Pleasant and smooth, very friendly and inviting and if you’re not careful enough a “creeper” where you might not realize you’re drunk. I honestly wish I could have tried their cocktails. Definitely one of the best, if not, the best restaurant I have ever tried. It was all consistently good. The meats come with little condiments like kosher/flake salt, soy bean (daen jaang) wasabi sauce, wasabi (real deal version), and little garlic chips. Portion wise it’s definitely smaller than what you might be used to as it’s pretty much fine dining but the quality was really there. If you come with 2 people, it might suffice. It is definitely a must try and bucket...

This had to be the worst Korean bbq I’ve ever been to. I’ve been to just about every single one in LA. They give you some weird milk looking beef bone broth soup thing, that’s cold and flavorless to start, then they brought out the sides. I knew from seeing the salad that everything else was gonna be horrible. Those prepackaged salads at Ralph’s looked better than the one they put on the table. Everything else was hard and stale.

The meat was good quality, there wasn’t much flavor though, nothing special but definitely not worth the price.

They try too much to be high scale and the taste suffers. We ordered two meat plates and our bill was $400. We left and went to MUN, had 3x more food 10x more sides and tastes a million times better for less than we paid at AB

It’s hard to compete with all the restaurants in Korea town that are a few blocks away. I knew that being at the mall that it was gonna be horrible, but we tried to give it a shot. If you look around inside there’s not a single Korean in there, all tourists. This is a gringo KBBQ trap. Save your money and go to MUN or...