Jincook Santa Monica — Restaurant in Santa Monica

TL;DR: Will not return unless we’re realllllly in a pinch for Korean food. Would rather make the trip out to Koreatown. Faux-Korean in terms of food but great service.

👍 Great service from the staff! They were all attentive and fast in greeting, seating, ordering, and general check-ups. They clearly worked as a team and were friendly throughout the entire visit. 👎 Okay-to-meh food that’s definitely NOT authentically Korean; tasted more like the kind of “Korean” food that a non-Asian person (who lived in Korea for 5 years and came back home) were to make based on memory but never quite gets there. Like… I see the direction you were going but this is NOT it. Details below if you’re interested.

Jin Cook Kal-guksu (칼국수): Didn’t taste like any traditional kal-guksu that’s usually clam or chicken-broth based). Instead, theirs tasted like the Korean rice-cake soup (떡국) with knife noodles. Their description says seafood soup (with a few briskets and dumplings). However, their seafood flavor tasted pretty much like general anchovy-kelp broth (멸치육수). Not even close to the clam-based kal-guksu. They also served this dish with crispy onion flakes, which was completely random—like which authentic Korean dishes are served with crispy onion flake, let alone kal-guksu…?! Very confusing. It was not bad but you cannot call this kal-guksu or charge this invention at ~$19. If you want a real kal-guksu, a trip to k-town would be well-worth it.

Spicy Pork (매운 돼지 불고기): Looks good and not bad (2.5/5) but flavors were flat. Almost on the verge of not seasoned enough with…everything (salt, chili paste, chili powder, minced garlic, etc.). The meats came out almost minced/diced, rather than in bite-size chunks as you’d expect from Korean Spicy Pork (제육볶음). Weird preparation or wrong choice of meat. Not worth ~$26 for one serving.

Kimchi (cabbage; served as a side dish/banchan): Not really Kimchi… Not only the cabbages were not treated/prepped as kimchi (just straight-up salad), their kimchi marinade tasted more like a typical marinade for other side dishes that’s not kimchi. It’s not even gut-jul-ee (겉절이 freshly made kimchi). Hard to describe.. Just a really common side dish/banchan sauce 그냥 흔한 반찬 양념. Again, I get their concept but the execution...

This is a high quality restaurant! Food is great— just a few constructive criticisms.

FOOD: My favorite dish was the Marinated Dumplings that they served on the house. It is very flavorful and is definitely a must try. The Pork Katsu Curry was a pleasant surprise; flavorful curry. The tteokbokki was just alright, but I know that it’s definitely not their specialty so I don’t blame them. I hope they put more sauce in the tteokbokki though, as the dish got very dry and congealed half an hour into our meal.

SIDE DISHES & TAKE HOME POLICY: The side dishes were fresh and high quality. One thing though, they will charge you extra to pack home the side dishes. They said they’d let us pack it this time for free, but I was quite shocked, as we had only asked for a refill on 1 of the 4 side dishes a single time, so it was not like we were taking advantage of them. I feel that this policy is extremely wasteful, as customers who paid for their meal should be allowed to take home extra food for no extra cost. In the end, it will just be thrown away anyways, so why not let the customer take it home? I hope they change this policy in the future. I don’t want to undermine the great food or service, but this definitely deducted from my experience.

SERVICE: The staff were friendly and very helpful. Shoutout to the one waitress who explained where the correct parking was and helped my friend clean off her bag when food had accidentally dropped onto it.

PARKING: There is a small covered parking lot on Stanford St for free two hour parking.

There are not many good Korean restaurants in this area, so I’m glad this restaurant is...

Pretty uncommon finding Korean food around this area and yes, it's recently opened one. Admittedly, I'm not huge fan of K-food, but yeah giving it a chance following the big crowd I was with (unpopular opinion but hey everyone has preference ;) ).

The place looked pretty busy on dinner time, but not that long until we got seated; totally not bad for group of 12.

Starting with Marinated Dumplings, which opened the course nicely with flavorful dumplings came in sweet and spicy soy-based sauce.

Being a cheese-holic, felt wrong not ordering the cheese katsu. It was decent with filling portion, and stuffing it with jalapenos was great idea to give extra spicy kick. The curry itself was good but wouldn't say it's outstanding. I also expected to get more cheese in the katsu.

The braised beef rib (galbi) with extra cheese topping was probably the spotlight on the table, and indeed one of their signature dishes. The beef was juicy and tender with some fats mixed in. The overall sauce was luscious and served in hot stone doubtlessly elevated the dish as it stayed warm.

I opted for Hotteok as dessert, yes the Korean pancake filled with honey, nuts, and brown sugar. I unfortunately wasn't into Jin Cook's as it's bit greasy to my liking and it's further topped with chocolate sauce which wasn't my preference for my hotteok.

Nonetheless, overall their signature dishes were...