Janchi Korean BBQ & Bar — Restaurant in Thousand Oaks

The service here for weekday lunch is top notch. September 2022, there was a lovely and friendly Latina woman who was our waitress. She was on it, checked in on us quite often, and made some suggestions off the menu to try.

It's your typical Korean barbecue place, where you cook the meat yourself on a grill.

I have to say that this is one of the rare places where their Grill actually pulls the smoke back into itself. So it's not a smokey restaurant like most of the Korean barbecue places are.

For the price, it's a great value. You want the best deal? Go for lunch, and get the lunch price!

It's a tradeoff though... they keep their prices low by having a limited menu. So if you want to spend the extra money and go all out to have more choices, you have to pay the extra dollars and get the dinner priced stuff.

Parking situation: There is tons of parking available for free in the surrounding lot.

Notes: For what this place is, in the area that it's in, it's definitely worth it. Otherwise, you'd have to spend all that money and gas, and sit in traffic to go to the San Fernando valley, or down to Koreatown in downtown LA.

With the exception of a few items on the menu (the fatty Bulgogi), most of the meat that you will order comes without any seasoning. If you want to enhance the flavor, ask your server for some salt, and sprinkle it on during the cooking process.

Speaking of bulgogi, I think it's one of the best things on the menu at any Korean barbecue place in general. It comes marinated, and the extra fat helps to keep the meat juicy and tender.

In summary, this is a great place to bring family to, or out of town visitors. It's a different experience then your typical sit-down restaurant. The flavor profile at most Korean BBQ places is usually sweet with the little hint of sour. So if you're into that kind of thing, give this...

My wife, granddaughter, and I stopped into Janchi Korean BBQ & Bar a few weeks ago while in Los Angeles. From the look of the restaurant inside and out, I wasn't thrilled to eat here. But I was outvoted, and so this is where we had dinner.

From the start, the service was slow, almost non-existent. It took more than 10-15 minutes for anyone to approach us. And it's not like they were busy; in fact, there couldn't have been a dozen customers in the entire place. I'm guessing, like most restaurants these days, they're understaffed and overworked, so I cut them some slack.

However, the food wasn't very good at all, and to be honest, I became a little sick to my stomach after eating very little of the all-you-can-eat offerings. My wife said the food was "okay", but I think she was "covering" herself because she went against my suggestion to move on to another restaurant. My granddaughter always says the food is good, but since she didn't eat much, she didn't enjoy it. The AYCE BBQ (i.e., brisket, pork, chicken, and steak) was, at best, below average in taste and quality. The side dishes were not very good or plentiful, which isn't typical of most Korean restaurants. It was the egg roll that made me nauseous. I know, egg rolls in a Korean restaurant make no sense, and I should have known better.

My wife insisted that it was okay for the $120.00 we paid for two adults and a child. I disagree, but my wife is Korean, and who am I to go against her since she's a chef? My rating of Janchi BBQ & Bar is way higher than I would have given. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for Korean food that day? Let's chalk it up to that and call it a day. watch out for...

We were finally close enough to try this place and decided to drive a little more out of our way to give it a shot. There isn’t much for Korean food around the Ventura area, but we wouldn’t drive the further distance again to come back here.

We ordered the spicy tofu soup (similar to soondubu jiggae), dumplings, and calamari as appetizers while waiting for our meats. The dumplings and calamari were both a little oily and unremarkable, also served with some sort of ranch aioli for some reason. The soup tasted like a very watered down version of soondubu jiggae and you could tell by how watered down the broth looked, which also included mushrooms. The bonchon provided was ginger, beansprouts, kimchi, and some sort of soy-jalapeño-onion sauce.

We had several meats (ribeye, prime sirloin, boneless short rib, beef belly, beef bulgolgi, red pepper pork belly) and they weren’t very flavorful compared to other KBBQ we’ve had with the exception of the red pepper pork belly. The plus however is that they were served pretty fast. We asked if there were any dipping sauces to eat the meats with (specifically sesame oil or gochujang) and were brought a sesame oil dish as well as a cup of soy sauce, some sort of red sweet sauce, and another aioli. Just not very authentic Korean. Along with these, they did bring us a mixed green salad with a ginger dressing that was good.

The place was clean and in a nice...