Chowon officially marks my 3rd Christmas in a row, eating out at a Korean restaurant. It was unintentional, I swear.
When I spent my Christmas week in Auckland, I didn't realize most businesses would be closed (especially the day before Christmas). I went to Auckland with the mindset of having New Zealand cuisine (whatever that is). After circling around CBD on Christmas for what seemed like hours, trying to resist Korean and halal food, my mother and I finally kept heading south to see if there was anything mildly interesting--but ended up giving in when we saw the amazing $20 AYCE Korean barbecue deal. It seemed too good to be true, but it was.
For the price of $20 NZD, it is a complete bargain from where I come from (where you pay upwards of at least $30 USD with limited options). This place is small and quaint and resembles a cheap Asian restaurant--doable if you don't care for decor. It is all self-service and DIY. The selection is great--they have such a great variety of different meats, like pork loin, pork belly, lamb, kalbi, to name a few. No complains since they had all the kbbq essentials. I also loved that they offered a few Korean staple dishes, such as kimchi and japchae, and they even had greenshell mussels (though quite limited), which everyone fought their way through for.
All was going well and it was becoming a good experience for a dinner we did not anticipate at all. My mother is traditionally Chinese, so she likes steamed veggies. Because the grills had to have foil sheet changed, my mother put a new sheet over and thought she could try cooking a lettuce leaf with a small amount of water. An older Korean man (whom I assume is the owner) saw this and started going berserk on us and pulled a staff member in, yelling in Korean. Of course, this caused most of the restaurant to turn heads on us but we had no idea what he was so angry about. The staff member kindly told us that we shouldn't cook the veggies on the grill, as the water might leak through a hole in the foil sheet and damage the grill, but I'm pretty sure the oil the meats excrete may do much more harm. Other than that scenario, I had no problems because I was very full at the end. I will say that the meat batches were inconsistent--they would bring out frozen meat and fresh meat interchangeably. read more