Park's BBQ

• Cuisine(s): Barbecue, Korean
  Hours: Daily 11am-1am
  Price: $$
• Payment Types: MasterCard, Visa, American Express
  Features: Family Style, Takeout
  Serving: Dinner, Lunch
• Alcohol: Full bar
  Reservations: Accepted
  Parking: Valet

Description

The waiter comes over, rubs the hot grill with a lump of beef suet. He flinches back, as the melted fat explodes into a rush of blue flame. He lays meat on the grill as tenderly as you might put a kitten to bed, which almost makes sense, at more than $30 for an order of sliced Kobe-style beef and near that for short ribs, this is the most expensive Korean barbecue in town. Even wrapped into a lettuce leaf with bean paste, half a raw garlic clove and a bit of coarse salt, if the supremely beefy flavor comes through. Park's Tokyo-X crossbred pork belly may be the best pig in Koreatown at the moment, slabs of fat striated with meat, creaminess fading into translucency after a couple of minutes on the grill, and then into the sort of juicy pop you might associate with the seared pancetta in a really good plate of spaghetti carbonara. Park's is a modern place, all steel and glass; the waiters resemble members of a martial-arts team more than they do restaurant workers. And while the quality of the meat, is a least a tick or two higher than at other high-end barbecue places, the restaurant does not hold back on the array of panchan, the little egg pancakes, puréed squash, tiny fish, kimchi, spicy roots, broccoli, and a half-dozen other things that are the measure of a Korean restaurant.