SungBookDong BBQ — Restaurant in New York

If Korean BBQ is on your mind and you're anywhere near Queens, Sung Book Dong should be top of mind.

Our family ordered servings of both the marinated and plain short ribs and I was shocked by how tender and flavorful these meats were. The server comes by to cook, flip, and cut the meats on a tabletop grill so that all you need to do is to have your chopsticks and appetite ready. Best of all, they use a gas grill AND a low-hanging vent over the tabletop grill. I know there are folks out there who'll argue the merits of cooking over charcoal briquets (which some other restaurants do), but there's nothing worse than having dinner and then smelling it on your clothes for days to come.

Ordering any of the BBQ meats not only means you get to watch the best meat-based tabletop cooking show; it also means the rest of your table space will be littered with all kinds of banchan, or free side dishes. You'll see all the standards like a dressed salad, kimchi, and sesame-seasoned spinach, but there's all kinds of other special ones here - kabocha squash salad, a savory Korean egg soufflé, and raw marinated crab.

We also tried the seafood pancake, which was outstanding. Crispy, full of seafood, and sizable enough to share as a party of four, this was a lovely accompaniment to all the meat.

If there are downsides, it's with the little things. While the interior of the restaurant is pretty large, the tables are fit in close together so get ready to eavesdrop on lots of conversations at neighboring tables (and vice versa). This restaurant is a hotspot for Korean BBQ and it shares space with a few other businesses in the complex, so what little parking is available in the lot goes fast. We're often better off finding street parking along...

Really bad service. We still have 2 guests (total 4) haven’t arrive so we order some appetizers (around $70.00) and tell time we will order more bbq until our guests arrive. The lady server look at us ( sound like we are a cheap customer), when the raw crab served, we requested 2 bowls of white rice ( cause it’s taste better to eat with some rice), the lady look at us like (Jesus, this 2 cheap guys came here order 3 small dishes and 2 bowls of rice? ) my friend question here why no small dishes serve， most Korea restaurants serve quite numbers of small dishes, the lady look at my friend and freeze for 10 seconds, sound like you guys are so unbelievable, with 3 small order and you ask for free side dishes. So, they didn’t serve us the free small dishes. 30 minutes after our 2 guests arrive and we added 3-4 dishes, then the free small dishes appeared, Jesus? They grill our ribeye, duck meat and beef tongue on a hot plate? It’s fried lady, not grill. My friend ask them why, their answer is you need to order Korean bbq? What? Korean bbq? What the hell is that? We in a Korean bbq restaurant and we order expensive ribeye, beef tongue and duck breast, it’s still not Korean BBQ? Our check came...

We visited this restaurant on Father’s Day with a party of 8 (4 adults and 4 children). After waiting over 40 minutes to be seated, we placed a reasonable order for our group: one seafood hot pot, two combo meals, and a seafood pancake.

However, to our surprise, the server told us they would not start preparing our food because we “didn’t meet the minimum order” for an 8-person table. There were no visible signs, notices, or information on the menu about any minimum spending requirement for seating — and we were never informed of this before or during the ordering process.

we offered to order more food if needed — but the staff refused to start preparing anything at all unless we first committed to ordering more. This left us confused, frustrated, and disappointed, especially with hungry kids waiting after a long wait. If there is a policy like this, it should be clearly stated and communicated upfront — not enforced arbitrarily after this long wait.

This kind of treatment is unacceptable, and we hope the management takes this feedback seriously to improve communication and transparency with...