Chilgok camping-style BBQ: wood-fire stone plate at Yaksamgol Garden

It's been proper autumn weather lately, and I've really wanted to go camping — mostly just to build a campfire and do a barbecue. So when I heard there was a camping-style restaurant in Chilgok, not far from me, I went to check it out.

Yaksamgol Garden (약샘골가든) in Yakmok-myeon, Chilgok, Gyeongbuk is actually close to Gumi on the map too, so it's become a regular spot for me.

Indoor or outdoor seats at Yaksamgol Garden: where should you sit?

Yaksamgol Garden takes online reservations and is split into indoor and outdoor seating. In summer it was too hot so I went indoors, but now with the breeze feeling so nice, I sat outside.

Both indoor and outdoor sections share the same setup: a wood fire is lit and meat is grilled on a stone plate. Indoors, the air conditioning and a large fan keep things from getting too hot.

The outdoor section has atmospheric lighting and that camping-in-the-open feel — the vibe is great.

Most camping-style restaurants seem to struggle with seating larger groups, but at Yaksamgol Garden everyone can sit together and use two stone plates at once, which seemed really convenient.

Because of that, weekend lunches and dinners can have waits from families and groups out for a meal.

Yaksamgol Garden menu: pork, smoked duck, and stew, ramyeon and sausage sides

The menu board at Yaksamgol Garden is posted up high, so you have to tilt your head back to see it. Pork and smoked duck are the main meat options, with sides like doenjang (soybean paste) stew, ramyeon, and grilled sausage.

Doing a camping barbecue usually means packing a lot from home, but here everything comes out for you — side dishes down to the ssamjang (dipping sauce) — so it's a Chilgok camping-style restaurant where you can get that outing feeling without going far at all.

House-made mugeunji (aged kimchi) leads the side dishes

We ordered pork belly and just waited for the wood fire to heat things up. In the meantime, side dishes and tableware arrived, and one side dish really stood out.

The star is the mukeunji (aged kimchi) made in-house at Yaksamgol Garden, using domestic napa cabbage and ingredients they grow themselves. I doubt you could recreate this flavor at home. It's good eaten as is, but grilling it in the pork fat that renders onto the stone plate makes it even better.

Grilling pork belly on the wood-fire stone plate

Yaksamgol Garden's pork belly has a well-balanced ratio of fat to lean meat, so the juices when grilled are seriously impressive.

It takes a bit for the wood fire to heat up, but once the stone plate gets hot, it's blazing from then on.

They wipe the grill down with pork fat to oil it up.

Onion, mushrooms, and tteok (rice cake) that come with the pork belly get grilled on too. The plate is large and wide, so everything can go on at once and be shared easily.

As fat renders off the meat, they place the aged kimchi near the spot where the fat drips down, to grill it there.

We also ordered sausage and put it on top of the grill, and it cooked even faster than the meat.

The tteok and sausage cooked first, so we tried them right away — completely different from grilling at home. Being outdoors in what feels like an open campsite makes the food taste even better.

There's no designated person to do the grilling — everyone just puts things on the plate and grills together, so the whole table can eat their fill. And with the autumn breeze drifting by, it wasn't hot at all — it really felt like we'd come out camping.

Garden lettuce, seasoned chive salad and roasted sweet potato to finish

The lettuce at Yaksamgol Garden is grown in their own garden too, and it was tender rather than tough — really tasty.

The main pork belly was savory, and the fattier parts got grilled crisp until they were as crunchy as a chip.

The seasoning on the chive salad was spicy-sweet, cutting through the richness of the meat, and it disappeared in no time.

And the highlight of Yaksamgol Garden is the roasted sweet potato — as the wood fire burns down near the end, they tuck foil-wrapped sweet potatoes right into the embers.

The whole place already had that outing feeling from the outside, but eating the roasted sweet potato made me feel like I'd genuinely gone camping — that was Yaksamgol Garden, a great Chilgok restaurant. If packing camping gear and food feels like too much hassle, why not try a camping-style restaurant in Chilgok instead?