Yeongjong shabu-shabu buffet with 2-hour parking: Pyeonbaek Hoegwan

I've been craving shabu-shabu pretty often lately haha. While looking for lunch spots in Yeongjong, I found a place where you can eat cypress steam, shabu-shabu, kalguksu (knife-cut noodle soup), and porridge all in one visit. It's Pyeonbaek Hoegwan Main Branch, a well-known shabu-shabu spot in Yeongjong. We went on a weekday for lunch, three of us :)

Where to park at Pyeonbaek Hoegwan: 2 hours covered underground

When you visit Pyeonbaek Hoegwan Main Branch, you can park underground in the building, and if it's full, there's also a parking lot at the nearby Jinro Mart. We drove there too, and having 2 hours of parking support from meal to exit made things easy.

Unlike a typical shabu-shabu place where it's just meat and vegetables and done, Pyeonbaek Hoegwan lets you eat a full meal in order — cypress steam → shabu-shabu → rice-paper rolls → kalguksu → porridge — plus use the salad bar throughout.

Inside Pyeonbaek Hoegwan: seating, atmosphere, and the playroom

Walking in, the place was bigger than I expected. Plenty of tables were set up and the spacing between seats wasn't cramped. There were partitioned booth-style seats here and there so you weren't crammed right next to the next table, and there were also spots good for larger groups — it looked good for a family meal out or a work dinner.

One side of the restaurant had floor-to-ceiling windows, so the open view was nice too :)

In the center of the restaurant is a salad bar with all-you-can-eat beef, vegetables, and side dishes. Everything was kept clean overall, and during our meal the owner kept checking the ingredients and carefully tidying the self-serve bar. Anything that ran low got refilled right away and the area was tidied often, so it stayed clean to use.

There's also a separate playroom on one side. Shabu-shabu meals tend to run a bit long, so having a playroom is definitely convenient if you're visiting with kids. There were also baby chairs ready, which explains why so many families come here.

Weekday lunch runs until 3 p.m., with five broths and a half-and-half option

On weekdays you can order the lunch menu until 3 PM. Eating cypress steam, then shabu-shabu meat, vegetables, rice-paper rolls, kalguksu, and porridge in sequence felt less like ordering one dish and more like enjoying a course, one item at a time.

You can choose the shabu-shabu broth from several options.

• Katsuo
• Spicy mushroom
• Doenjang chicken
• Bone-marrow mala
• Bone-marrow tomato

That's the lineup. We went with katsuo + spicy mushroom.

What's on the self-serve bar, from rice-paper roll fixings to tteokbokki and spaghetti

Pyeonbaek Hoegwan's self-serve bar was quite varied. From the vegetables you add to shabu-shabu, to rice-paper roll ingredients, various sauces, noodles, and side dishes — it's all lined up on one side. I think the vegetables are the most important part of shabu-shabu, and here they looked fresh overall with plenty of variety, which I liked.

The self-serve bar wasn't just shabu-shabu ingredients — there were also french fries, corn salad, tteokbokki (spicy rice cakes), spaghetti, and more. For side dishes, the lineup was better than I expected, good for picking at before diving into the shabu-shabu. There were also items kids would like, so it seemed like a good spot for families to eat together.

There were two cuts of beef, pork-neck style (mokchim) and beef brisket (usamgyeop), so you could choose based on preference. I picked the usamgyeop 😎😎

Fresh vegetables and tasty sides brought back first from the salad bar 😍 Since you eat rice-paper rolls together with the cypress steam, I loaded up on rice-paper roll vegetables and the rice paper itself 😋

Cypress-steamed beef after 9 minutes: how tender was it?

Apparently the cypress steam includes quite a few ingredients — star anise, mondo grass root, angelica root, milkvetch root, whole peppercorns, white peony root, and more. According to the sign, the broth and sauces are all made in-house, and even the cypress steamer itself is built using traditional joinery without screws. It didn't feel like just another all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu place — you could tell they put real care into ingredients and cooking methods.

Once you sit down, the cypress steam is the first thing brought to your table. They set a timer, and after about 9 minutes it's ready to eat.

When the lid came off, the meat and bean sprouts were cooked through and moist. I've had cypress steam a few times elsewhere, but the meat at Pyeonbaek Hoegwan was genuinely tender. Since it's steamed, it felt less greasy and cleaner, but the meat wasn't dry — it chewed soft and easy.

Eating it together with the bean sprouts added a crisp texture that worked really well. The meat itself was so tender that even just a light dip in soy sauce was delicious.

Cypress-steamed meat in rice-paper rolls, with peanut sauce

Cypress steam is delicious on its own, but it's even better with rice-paper rolls 😋 Adding crisp vegetables to the clean-tasting steamed meat made it much lighter and more refreshing to eat.

I liked dipping this combo lightly in peanut sauce. Since the cypress steam itself isn't strongly flavored, it paired well with the rice-paper rolls without either flavor overpowering the other.

We ate happily and before we knew it, the cypress steam was gone...😁 So we asked for the shabu-shabu broth right away and went to the self-serve bar for vegetables.

Katsuo and spicy mushroom half-and-half shabu-shabu

There were plenty of vegetables good for shabu-shabu — napa cabbage, bean sprouts, various mushrooms, and more. I tend to load up on vegetables when eating shabu-shabu, and here the vegetables were in good condition overall with lots of variety, so it was fun picking and choosing.

Being able to choose half-and-half broth was much better than sticking to just one flavor. The katsuo was a familiar, clean shabu-shabu broth taste, good for tasting the vegetables and meat cleanly, while the spicy mushroom had a bit of a kick, good for switching things up as you kept eating. At first I mostly ate from the katsuo side, but partway through I kept reaching for the spicy mushroom side too haha.

As we added plenty of napa cabbage and mushrooms and let it simmer, the broth got increasingly refreshing. The bean sprouts stayed crisp, the mushrooms soaked up the broth and cooked soft, and the thinly sliced meat, briefly cooked in the simmering broth, went down tender rather than tough.

Dipped in the katsuo broth, the meat tasted clean; dipped in the spicy mushroom broth, that punchy flavor soaked into the meat for a richer taste. When you're eating shabu-shabu, you naturally end up ordering more meat haha. Here you can grab as much meat and vegetables as you want, so it was easy to just restock whatever was running low.

Dumplings and sujebi add-ins, then porridge to finish

After we'd had our fill of shabu-shabu, we added dumplings and sujebi (hand-torn dough soup add-in) into the pot too. By then the broth had already absorbed plenty of flavor from all the meat and vegetables we'd simmered. The dumplings especially were big and delicious — I ate two even though I was already full,,😑😑

And finally we finished with porridge. We grabbed rice and egg from the porridge corner and added them to the remaining broth. Since we'd kept simmering meat and vegetables in it, the broth itself was deeply flavored, and with rice and egg added it turned into a nutty, soft porridge. After shabu-shabu, kalguksu, and then porridge on top of that, it really felt like a complete meal haha.

Is Pyeonbaek Hoegwan worth it for a group lunch in Yeongjong?

Eating cypress steam, then rice-paper rolls, shabu-shabu, sari add-ins, and porridge in order made for a pretty full meal. With a playroom and a spacious dining room, it seems like a good option for a family meal out or a lunch with a group in Yeongjong. Next time, I'd like to try a different broth combination :)