Beef and lamb BBQ in Jeongja-dong: 3 mashed potato refills, Nokji

Today I'm reviewing Nokji, a great spot in Jeongja-dong. I hadn't had lamb in a while and really wanted some, so here's my record of a visit where I enjoyed it properly 🥩

Nokji Bundang Jeongja Branch: location, hours and parking

Nokji Bundang Jeongja Branch is at 13 Jeongja-ro, Bundang-gu, Seongnam, on the 1st floor, and it's open daily 16:00–22:00. For parking, use the Jeongja Station public transfer parking lot, a 5-minute walk away, and I hear they cover 2 hours.

Nokji is a 6-minute walk from Exit 3 of Jeongja Station. It's a stylish BBQ restaurant where you can enjoy both beef and lamb.

What's the Nokji interior and seating like?

The inside of Nokji Bundang Jeongja Branch is a decent size with clean wood-toned interiors, and I loved the stylish mood 🪵✨ The left side has tables and the right side has a bar-table counter.

It's a good atmosphere for office gatherings or dates. We went on a weekday evening and, of course, it was full of customers..!

Nokji menu and what we ordered

Let's look at the menu first.

The Nokji menu is split into beef and lamb. Beef has raw galbi (short rib), chuck flap, ribeye cap and marinated grill; lamb has shoulder rack, French rack, loin and lamb rib meat. You can order à la carte or as sets for each, and you can even mix beef + lamb in one set, which I liked 👍🏻

There were two of us, so we ordered the beef + lamb set for two. ✔️ (raw galbi, shoulder/French rack)

For snacks there's yukhoe (beef tartare), and for meals there's mentaiko green onion rice, buckwheat makguksu (cold noodles) and beef jangteo soup. Doesn't that menu read like someone who really knows good food 😋 We ate our fill of meat and finished with the mentaiko green onion rice.

The drinks are varied too, with traditional liquor, wine, highballs and whisky, so it's a great place with a nice mood to have drinks with your meat ✨

Nokji's basic setup and side dishes

The basic setup at Nokji is very neat too. Salt is put out on a stylish square small plate, and you get perilla oil aged kimchi, a special sauce & Cheongyang chili pepper (take as much as you like), wasabi, herring roe jeotgal (salted seafood), and siraegi (dried radish greens) seasoned with traditional doenjang and perilla oil. Just the sides tell you they know their food 😌

Everything was delicious and I ate plenty, but the siraegi with doenjang and perilla oil was especially good, so I got a refill haha

What's in the beef & lamb set for two?

The Nokji beef & lamb set for two comes with 1 rack of aged raw galbi and 1 rack of shoulder & French rack, plus green onion, mushrooms, onion and minari (water dropwort). It works out to about 2 servings of beef galbi + 1 serving of shoulder & French rack, so the composition is great ✨

The staff grilled all the meat for us so we didn't have to worry about anything..!

Grilling the aged raw galbi

First they coat the vegetables in olive oil, then start with the aged beef raw galbi. It looks great already... good-quality chilled meat really is different.

The galbi gets its coating too.

Wow... the flashy grilling skill, like coating the meat with fire, was a work of art 🔥

The lean meat and the rib-bone meat are cut separately〰️ neatly and grilled. They cook it medium rare to medium so it's easy to eat, and if you tell them your preference, they'll adjust it.

How were Nokji's sauce combos and mashed potatoes?

Along the way, Nokji brings out an egg yolk sauce (sukiyaki-sauce style) with white truffle, plus mashed potatoes. The flavor combinations were great, so eating them together was both tasty and fun. Neither was ordinary; both were premium sides that boosted the flavor a lot. The mashed potatoes in particular were so smooth and flavorful, record-breaking really, that I refilled them 3 times, that... hahaha

The carefully grilled meat is placed on something like a mini brazier(?), so we could eat it while it stayed warm.

Trying one combo at a time! First the sukiyaki-style sauce: the galbi was really tender and juicy, filling my mouth with happiness.. and it was sweet, with that extra touch of white truffle, so charming 👍🏻

Next, spreading mashed potatoes on it like a steak. They're so smooth there's barely any texture, melting gently in your mouth.. 🥔 Do I even need to say it, jmt (so tasty)... when you refill, they bring it out even hotter, and I lost my mind.. Definitely try it!

Then dip it in the special sauce loaded with Cheongyang chili, a slightly sweet, spicy, sharp sauce, and eat it with chili and wasabi: my favorite combo, done. 🤎 It's clean yet sharp and so addictive... With the juicy raw galbi it's beyond words.. truly the flower of galbi.

The meat left on the bones is cut small and served with grilled minari. They grilled it so it wasn't tough, and the rib meat had a lovely chewy texture. It goes well with the fragrant, crunchy minari.. I feel like I could inhale it endlessly haha

How were Nokji's French rack and shoulder rack?

Now on to the lamb. French rack first.

They grill onion and green onion and put them on top too, and how good do you think that is with it? The flavor combo -

French rack is a cut known for a good balance of tender lean meat and fat, and I was surprised at how soft and tender it was. With grilled onion, love it..

Nokji serves a basil and cheese sauce with the lamb, and this was really delicious too.. They offer all sorts of unfamiliar but well-matched flavor combinations, which is fun and tasty..

They grilled the shoulder rack for us too.

Shoulder rack is a cut with moderate marbling and a great texture. My partner and I were so impressed because it was so good. Juicy, tender and chewy, a different charm from beef galbi, so delicious.. + the combo with the special sauce and Cheongyang chili was exactly my taste ✨

Extra shoulder rack and mentaiko green onion rice

In the end we ordered 1 more serving of shoulder rack. It was too hard to stop,, + we ordered the mentaiko green onion rice too.

They carefully grilled everything we added on, too 😌

Nokji's mentaiko green onion rice is a meal dish packed with low-sodium pollock roe, mayo, green onion and seaweed. They put a lot of roe on top, so it can be a little salty, but adding more rice made it just right. It's good on its own, with wasabi on top, or with meat. Highly recommended as a rice dish 🤤

Like this.. the chewy yet tender shoulder rack with umami-packed mentaiko rice, nothing but good..

Is Nokji Bundang Jeongja Branch worth recommending?

Nokji Bundang Jeongja Branch, where I finally had a proper beef + lamb meal, has a unique mood and table layout, and I think it's a stylish BBQ restaurant where you can eat good-quality beef and lamb together at their best, with no gamey smell. I recommend it to anyone looking for a Jeongja-dong, Bundang spot for a date, gathering or a meal out 👍🏻