bb.q Chicken South Salt Lake — Restaurant in South Salt Lake

I showed my boyfriend BB.Q Chicken in Hawaii last year and have been to a franchise in Las Vegas. So we are familiar with this place and that it does take awhile. We even had a mishap in Hawaii and our order took forever and we were given complimentary fries. He really wanted to go to opening day so we went anticipating there might be issues and being okay with it.

We get there at about 6:30pm and they state a 1 hour wait for food it was packed. He orders on the tablet kiosk and it takes down his name only with no receipt given. 1 8pc boneless 1 bulgogi rice bowl 1 fries and 2 fountain drinks very simple order. Workers were coming around looking for people for orders that weren’t collecting by names. They really didn’t have any organized system for the orders and it was pretty confusing and chaotic at the counter. It was a young girl and guy and an older woman that I’m pretty positive is an owner working alongside them.

It gets to be an hour now and we are worried about our order and not knowing when to pick it up due to they only started calling out numbers and we hadn’t heard a name in a long time and we never got assigned a number. My boyfriend goes up there and checks on the counter and they have no matching order up there and our order doesn’t exist for them. He has a charge on his card so he knows it went through. The girl gets flustered and goes back to just trying to figure out all the orders around and he has to wait like 10 more minutes to talk to the guy. He manually writes his order down apologizes and we start waiting again.

By this time it is about 7:45pm (1.5hrs) and we see many people getting food and even offering of free beverages and drinks for people about the long waits. Mind you those people got their food at normal times from what I was seeing. The owner woman walks by checks on what we ordered we tell her what we ordered. And doesn’t come back. It’s now around 8:30pm (2hrs) and they close at 9pm it is empty now they are visibly slowing down and starting to close. We finally see my bowl on a tray and a few minutes the chicken. She asks if it’s good and we tell her we did order fries and she goes comes back and says there is only 2 things on the ticket are we sure? My boyfriend is very sure she kept questioning it that isn’t what the ticket says (not even the original ticket the hand written one that the worker might of not written the fries down we told him we had fries). My boyfriend just says I must have been mistaken it’s fine to just get over it we are really tired and hungry. Mind you he was charged about $50 dollars and adding up the items we received it was $31 he did not tip $20 dollars so what else could it be??

She leaves and she did not say sorry or apologize for anything at all one time and we had patiently been waiting 2 hours and caused no issues even with our wrong order. It’s obvious they shows no urgency to right our order and they purposely made our order totally last after everyone was finished. Half of his chicken was cold and he could not even eat it.

We leave and only the young man said goodbye as we left and everyone else followed him. I really believe if he didn’t nobody would have said anything.

Very disappointing he absolutely loves this chicken and we were surprised to see it was opening up last minute. Somebody mentioned it in the other long low review and we do feel a bit discriminated against. But we are open to trying them out again when they work out the kinks.

Please work on treating everyone fairly, work on your order organization especially since this night you were unable to do online order I could expect even more chaos and mistakes once you open those up, staff being able to handle pressure, and I don’t believe the customer is always right but you should be open that mistakes can happen on your end and maybe you should bite the bullet and believe the customer when they are persistent they ordered an item and it...

I was so excited for this to open! This is their first day, so I knew they would be very busy. I tried to call around 5:30 PM to do a to-go order. No one answered the phone, so I decided to go after work to place the order. When I arrived, it was very busy! All of the tables were full, but no one had any food yet. When I placed my order, they did not tell me how long of a wait it would be, though I guessed it would be around 30 minutes. I was wrong. After about 20 minutes, another person ordered and was told it would be an hour. So I decided to ask and they said it would also be an hour at least. I decided to leave and go run errands first to wait for an hour to be up. I came back around an hour and 20 minutes after I placed the order, and there were a lot of orders being sent to the tables, and people were picking up to-go orders. I waited for another maybe 10 minutes and then decided to ask how long it would be. They told me maybe another hour. I decided that I had already waited for an hour and 30 minutes, so I might as well keep waiting. I do understand that I decided to wait and I didn't want to be a problem customer. They did offer to refund if I didn't want to wait the additional estimated hour. If I had been told before ordering that I would be waiting at least an hour, I wouldn't have ordered tonight. There wasn't any other type of compensation for the wait; and I was watching as Korean's picked up their orders and they were given free drinks as apology for the long wait and some were given some side dishes. But, that was not happened with everyone, including me. Even though it was my decision to wait, it does seem like there should be some sort of compensation offered to everyone, not just certain people. I did finally get my order after 2 hours of waiting. The chicken was cooked well, but my chicken didn't have much flavoring on it. I have been to other locations of BB.Q (both in the US and Korea) and while I've had to wait a little bit for food, this was crazy! The chicken also had way more seasoning on it at the other locations. Again, I know this was their first day open and they were not prepared to have as much business as they did. They also seemed to be getting orders mixed up at the front, and gave out incorrect orders, so it seems like that could have been part of the problem. The front of house workers seemed really overwhelmed. I do think that if they had wait times for over 1+ hour for chicken, they should have stopped accepting orders until they were caught up. That would have been better than waiting without a clear idea of when the food would be ready. I do hope they improve their service over the next few weeks and hope eventually I can go back and have a...

Today, my girlfriend and I joined her Mom for lunch here. (They are Korean, and so wanted to give this place a try while in Salt Lake), and all I have to say, NEW FAVORITE RESTAURANT.

FOOD- A+

The only way I can honestly properly describe the food here is absolutely incredible! Everything is mouth-watering and fantastic. We started with the Kimchi Fried Rice, which was decent but a bit light flavored as it was lacking the amount of Kimchi we usually expected, but it was good nonetheless.

We then had the Gangjeong & Honey Garlic Chicken wings, and my girl had the Bolgogi rice bowl. The bolgogi meat ws so tender that it melted in our mouths, and the onions gave a great balance of flavor to the dish.

However, the wings here are fried to perfections and then glazed with some of the best sauces I have ever eaten. (And I am a sauce kind of guy. Haha). The Gangjeong & Honey Garlic were absolute perfection, fully flavored, and left us wanting more every time we finished one. They were so good we ordered two more orders of the Gangjeong to go to take home with us!!!

SERVICE -A

The service here was great and the employees were very knowledgeable and friendly. The only qualm I had was that my lady's Bolgogi rice bowl wasn't ordered so we had to reorder it and wait for her food, but the staff was apologetic and quick to get her food out for us.

ATMOSHPERE- A+

To finish up, they have a positive, upbeat vibe with a healthy mix of both American & Korean music. My girl's Mom is a huge BTS fan and so loved hearing their music and seeing them in the restaurant's advertisement around the place on the televisions. This restaurant does a great job of balancing a professional, clean business feel with that at home comfortably.. perfectly.

In closing, I would recommend this place as it is a 10/10, 5 star restaurant. If you are looking for a fun eatery for a date, a quick lunch with friends, have a love Korean chicken or BTS... this is your place. Cruise on down and enjoy everything this Korean BBQ restaurant has to offer!

**this review is honest first-hand testimony from a first-time customer with no prior knowledge or assumptions of the establishment. I have not been paid or coerced in any way to give this raving review of this business, (although if i were offered any discounts or deals on future orders i would gladly accept them without hesitation 😉) just massively surprised and impressed by this restaurant.

"Best time devouring chicken wings while bumping BTS...