Milyang pork BBQ with tiger bean doenjang stew: Dotdot Samun-dong

Dotdot Milyang Main Branch Hours: Daily 16:00–24:00 Last order: 23:30 Reservations available via Naver 🅿️ Plenty of nearby lots on vacant land

Finding a Samun-dong pork restaurant after a day out in Milyang

Wondering why I even ended up in Milyang? Honestly the original plan was something else entirely! I'd heard there's a big café in Milyang that's great to visit with kids, so we made a weekend trip out of it — but after playing at the café, just heading straight home felt like something was missing...

Right around dinnertime our stomachs started growling, so we figured "since we're here, let's eat dinner too" and went looking for good places to eat in Milyang. That's how I found this spot — the ✨newly hyped✨ Dotdot Milyang Main Branch, said to be rising fast as a hot BBQ restaurant in Samun-dong, Milyang. We had dinner here and it was so good that I wanted to recommend it to anyone else planning a Milyang day trip who also wants to sort out dinner while they're at it. Let's get into the review~ let's go 🤍

Sure enough, Samun-dong — Milyang's hotspot — was lined with BBQ restaurants, and this had the most eye-catching sign of them all! A super cute pig character for Dotdot 🐷🐽

The inside was bigger than I expected~ Seems like a solid spot for a Milyang family dinner or a Milyang group gathering too.

The Dotdot Milyang menu and what we ordered

For our meal, we ordered three servings of raw pork belly + one serving of raw pork jowl, and for dessert, the tiger bean doenjang (soybean paste) stew.

There's also a Dotdot Special menu where you can enjoy various cuts — pork belly, cartilage, jowl, cheek meat, skirt meat, and more — so keep that in mind too :)

The self-service bar was also neatly set up~

How the raw pork belly and pork jowl taste

The meat we ordered came out~ The color was gorgeous. A good balance of fat and lean meat. For reference, I think a 6:4 fat-to-lean ratio is the golden ratio for meat, haha — I'm firmly team more-fat, but this ratio was great too!

After being a blogger's husband for so long, my husband now knows exactly when to snap the photo and even arranges the meat nicely on the grill for me, haha 💓

He grilled the raw pork belly and jowl to a nice golden brown. Just the sight of it sizzling golden on the grill already looked delicious, haha. Crispy on the outside, moist on the inside — chewy yet tender at the same time! Grilled pork tastes best with just the right amount of fat, and here the lean and fat were mixed just right, giving a really nice savory flavor when grilled.

Set some meat aside for my daughter Jjan~

Dipping the meat deep into the sauce that came with it doubled the savory flavor! Amazing depth!!

My husband was wrapping a lettuce wrap so deliciously that I had to see what was in it, and he confidently showed it off — and honestly, it was a really well-made wrap, haha. He even showed it to me again for an encore (totally unnecessary), haha.

Two — no, three pieces of meat, garlic, and Dotdot's special olive kimchi all piled on, wow. Actually I don't wrap my meat in lettuce when I eat BBQ, so I wasn't that moved, haha.

The set sides: olive kimchi, myeoljorim and whole garlic gambas

The olive kimchi and cabbage salad that came as basic side dishes were a bit surprising! Olives and kimchi worked better together than I expected, and eating them with the pork belly especially cleaned the greasiness of the grilled pork right up in my mouth! The cabbage salad had tiny anchovies on top, and at first I was like, huh? What's this? — but it was sweet and salty and I kept reaching for more, haha.

We also boiled up the myeoljorim (fermented anchovy stew) and whole garlic gambas that come as basic sides, and ate them together with the meat~ The myeoljeot tasted exactly like the ones I've had at BBQ restaurants in Jeju, and the whole garlic gambas were totally my style 👍 It had saeujeot (salted shrimp) mixed in too, so it was salty and honestly even better than plain grilled garlic!!!

Like this~ topping the pork belly with whole garlic and saeujeot, yum.

The pork jowl has a completely different texture from the pork belly~ It's springy yet chewy, and the savory flavor builds the more you chew, so I kept going back for more without realizing it. Grilled not too dry, it still had juices left, and with just a light dip in salt you could really taste the meat itself.

It also went really well with the Ganggyeong seed jeotgal (salted seafood)! If the pork belly is moist and chewy, the pork jowl is springy with a satisfying bite!

Finishing with the signature tiger bean doenjang stew

To finish, we ordered Dotdot's signature dish as a Milyang pork belly restaurant — the tiger bean doenjang (soybean paste) stew! The portion was.. huge 🐯

Whenever I go to a BBQ restaurant I basically only ever order the light seafood doenjang stew, but oh~~ this really felt like a proper full doenjang stew set meal. There was clearly a lot of care put into it — even as a dessert dish, it was every bit as good as a main 🤎 Super rich and savory, and not sharply salty at all. Turns out Dotdot is also a great spot for doenjang stew!!

Why Dotdot Milyang is easy with kids

Coming out to Milyang from Changwon and discovering such a delicious restaurant made for a really good day! There's a park playground right out front too, so Jjan played there for a long while before we left~ I'd recommend this Milyang BBQ restaurant to anyone looking for a good spot to bring kids 💓🐷