Low-smoke family shabu-shabu buffet at Dongtan Station: Pyeonbaek

Lately whenever I go out for meat, I usually end up somewhere that's all about grilling — but this time I tried something a bit different. Pyeonbaek Hoegwan Dongtan Branch!

It's a place where you can eat cypress-steamed food and shabu-shabu together, and best of all it's an all-you-can-eat style where you grab whatever you want, so I figured it'd be perfect when I wanted to eat until I was stuffed haha. The first thing that caught my eye when I arrived was the entrance!

Pyeonbaek Hoegwan Dongtan entrance and the all-you-can-eat price

Pyeonbaek Hoegwan Dongtan Branch sits on the 2nd floor of Granvia Star at Dongtan Station, and the sign by the entrance had ₩19,900 written in big letters for the cypress-steam beef shabu-shabu all-you-can-eat course. True to its name, the entrance was decorated with a wood-toned look, and the atmosphere was better than I expected.

It had a bit of a Korean-restaurant feel but with a clean exterior, so it seemed like a nice spot to bring family. Eating meat properly outside these days tends to run pricey, but considering you can eat as much as you want of various things, the price seemed pretty good from the first impression.

Is Pyeonbaek Hoegwan good for kids? The playroom

On one side of Pyeonbaek Hoegwan Dongtan Branch there's a separate PLAY ROOM. Walking in, this was a bit of a surprise!

As you can see in the photo, the space is completely separate and has play equipment like a slide, which seems like a big plus for families with kids. In fact, when I was there, kids were actually playing in it — for parents, it's definitely convenient to have somewhere for a bored kid to go while you're still eating 🫢

The store itself was also bigger than I expected. The tables weren't cramped, and best of all, the big floor-to-ceiling windows made the whole place feel bright. There were plenty of seats too, so it seemed fine not just for family meals but also for larger group visits. When I went, the tables weren't full yet, so I could look around comfortably, and overall it felt well-kept and clean.

What's on the self-bar: meat, rice-paper roll vegetables and sides

Pyeonbaek isn't the kind of place where you sit down and just wait for what you ordered — there's fun in walking around and grabbing the ingredients you want yourself haha.

Meat first! Inside the fridge there's plenty of shabu-shabu meat ready, so you just take as much as you want. There's a sign up front saying 'only take what you'll eat' — since it's all-you-can-eat, it's probably better not to get greedy from the start and instead take a little at a time, going back for more if needed. I also thought 'this should be enough' at first, but ended up going back and forth several times lol.

And it's not just the meat that's unlimited — there was quite a variety of vegetables to add to the shabu-shabu too. Onion, cabbage, carrot, red cabbage, cheongyang chili, various sprouts and more were all there to take as much as you wanted, and vegetables for rice-paper rolls (spring roll wraps) were set up separately too. Having so many kinds of vegetables to choose from and pile on was great. Eating just meat the whole time can get old fast, but wrapping it in rice paper totally changes the feel haha.

Plenty of shabu-shabu ingredients to choose from

Heading over to the side, there's a whole lineup of ingredients for the shabu-shabu. Basic vegetables like bean sprouts, mushrooms, bok choy, and napa cabbage, along with eomuk (fish cake) skewers and noodles — you just pick whatever suits your taste.

I tend to load up on bean sprouts and mushrooms when eating shabu-shabu, and being able to take as much as I wanted without worrying about it is definitely the perk of all-you-can-eat lol. Basic side dishes like kimchi were prepared too, so you could take as much as you needed.

And it didn't stop there. Looking around, there were fried items like fries, a spicy-looking noodle dish, and even salads. You know how grabbing one thing after another before the main dish can quietly fill you up...lol. But when you see it, you grab it anyway. Fried rice and other hot dishes were prepared separately too, so I came in thinking it was simply 'meat + vegetable all-you-can-eat' and was a bit surprised at how much there actually was to eat.

For my first plate, I went a little bold and piled on a bit of everything. I grabbed cabbage, onion, carrot, and sprouts plus cheongyang chili for the rice-paper rolls, and on the side brought a bit of tteokbokki-style noodles and some fried items. When you come to a buffet like this, there's also the fun of trying a bit of each side dish rather than just going straight for meat haha.

Mix your own dipping sauce: a ponzu combo

There were several kinds of sauce set up on the table at Pyeonbaek Hoegwan Dongtan Branch, and personally I liked this part too. The ponzu sauce in the photo in particular pairs well with dipping cypress-steamed food or shabu-shabu meat, and the other sauces next to it let you customize things to your taste, so even the same meat could taste a bit different each time.

I started out trying a bit of every sauce, then eventually settled on the combination that suited me best lol. And now that I had vegetables, meat, and sauces all set up...

The main course: cypress-steamed beef and vegetables

After a short wait, one of today's mains — the cypress steam — came out. The moment the lid opened, steam billowed up, and it looked pretty appetizing from the get-go lol.

Inside the big cypress-wood steamer, bean sprouts lined the bottom with beef piled thickly on top. In the middle there was bok choy, napa cabbage, mushrooms, sweet pumpkin, and even shrimp, so the spread was fuller than expected. The meat in particular was sliced thin, which made it perfect for grabbing along with the sprouts.

Since cypress-steamed food isn't grilled, it leans more toward a clean flavor rather than the greasiness of grilled meat, and eating it with the crunchy bean sprouts underneath worked really well. Dipping it lightly in that ponzu sauce from before was personally my favorite way to eat it haha.

Since the meat isn't grilled, there's barely any smoke or smell, and it's relatively less greasy too, so it went down easily from the start without feeling heavy. It looked like a pretty big portion at first, but it disappeared in no time — pure magic...

After the cypress steam: shabu-shabu in half plain, half spicy broth

Once you've eaten a good amount of the cypress steam, you move on to shabu-shabu using the broth underneath. What I liked here too was that you don't have to stick to just one broth — you can enjoy half-and-half!

We went with plain broth on one side and spicy broth on the other, and even just from the photo you can tell the color difference lol. One side had a clean, mild flavor that was great for enjoying the natural taste of the vegetables and meat, while the other side had that red broth that looked spicy just from looking at it.

I'd personally recommend eating it split like this. Sticking to only the mild broth the whole time can get a little plain, and that's when having a bite of the spicy broth totally revives your appetite lol.

Once the broth started boiling hard, we properly loaded in the vegetables we'd grabbed from the self-bar earlier. Bok choy, napa cabbage, bean sprouts, mushrooms — I just threw in whatever I wanted plenty of. Shabu-shabu really tastes best when you dump in a ton of vegetables and boil them down rather than adding a little at a time... As the vegetables wilted and released their flavor into the broth, the soup got richer the longer it simmered compared to the first taste. The spicy broth especially got even tastier once mushrooms and napa cabbage went in.

Finishing with noodles in the shabu-shabu broth

Once the meat and vegetables were mostly eaten and the broth had properly developed, I added the noodles. This is another one of the best parts of shabu-shabu lol.

As shown in the photo, we added noodles to both broths and let them simmer — the noodles in the plain broth soaked up that clean broth flavor, giving almost the feel of warm noodle soup, while in the spicy broth it turned into a completely different dish. The noodles in the red broth especially... even when I was full, my hand kept reaching for more.

Left completely stuffed!! That's the end of this review.