I’ve lately fallen into a K-pop K-hole, listening to Spotify’s K-Pop Daebak playlist. The Korean word daebak can mean different things in different contexts: “surprise!,” “big success!,” or “awesome!” It’s also the name of a new Korean barbecue restaurant on the second floor of the once desolate eastern corner of the Chinatown Square mall. Daebak is owned by a woman named Namhee Kim, who a few years ago, drawn by an untapped market of K-pop-loving Chinese teenagers, opened the K-Pop of Chinatown store on nearby Wentworth.
Free side dishes also tend to soften the criticism most frequently lobbed at any given Korean barbecue joint—that the meat is too expensive. This certainly appears to be the case at Daebak, where a thinly sliced boneless rib eye or ten scraps of boneless short rib top out the menu at $32.99 per order. But these are of decent quality, and the act of griddling morsels of flesh, dredging them in salted sesame oil and the funky soybean-paste ssamjang, topping the bits with spicy scallion salad, and carefully wrapping it all in lettuce or daikon is a methodical endeavor utterly unlike tearing away at a dino-size porterhouse. The process gives the body time to digest, until it realizes it’s had quite enough meat.
If you approach Korean barbecue with the expectation that you’ll feast on cheap meats until you fall from your chair, and that you won’t pay much for it, then Daebak isn’t for you. (May I suggest San Soo Gab San?) But the place does have its charms. It’s slick and it’s new, and it’s not staffed by frowning ajummas who’ve worked harder in a week than you will all year. Friendly, chatty young servers frequently stop by to assist with the grillwork, leaving you plenty of time to take in the daebak K-pop idols on the TV screen above. v
2017 S. Wells 312-631-3913 daebakkoreanbbq.com
