Ansan Korean BBQ lunch special plus aged hanger steak: Yangsimso

For a hearty lunch with my mom, we went to Yangsimso Ansan Gojan Branch (양심소 안산고잔점), a BBQ restaurant in front of Ansan City Hall. The meat quality is good, but what really caught my eye were the many reviews saying the lunch special is packed with value, so I aimed for a weekday visit.

Yangsimso Ansan Gojan Branch lunch special: doenjang soup or naengmyeon

As the sign at the entrance says, there is a <rice + doenjang soup (soybean paste soup)> lunch special and a <naengmyeon (cold noodles)> lunch special. You can pick by taste, the price is reasonable, and since it's near City Hall, it looked great for city hall staff, firefighters and other office workers nearby at lunchtime.

One catch: the same menu has to be ordered for at least 2 servings, so the doenjang team and the naengmyeon team have to agree. I'm a naengmyeon lover, but my mom is a rice person 🍚 so I gave in for her.

Seating and booking a room

The interior is split into a hall and rooms. The hall has maybe 15–16 four-person tables? There are standalone four-person tables and 8-person tables made of two joined together, so you can choose based on your group size. The room has 6 four-person tables, which looked good for company dinners or group gatherings.

We have a baby, and I worried about disturbing other customers, so I requested a room in advance through Naver reservation.

Yangsimso Ansan Gojan Branch menu

There are lots of options, from beef like galbisal (rib meat), kkotgalbi (flower ribs) and toshisal (skirt steak) to pork like LA galbi and marinated pork galbi, so choosing is half the fun! The meal dishes for finishing up are also more varied than at a typical BBQ place: kodari (semi-dried pollack) naengmyeon, seonji haejangguk (ox blood hangover soup), yukhoe bibimbap (raw beef rice bowl), ttukbaegi ramyeon (ramen in a clay pot), and so on.

What we ordered: domestic homemade-marinade pork galbi set for 2 + skirt steak

These days my mom and I like pork more than beef, and since we came for the lunch special, we ordered 2 servings of the 'domestic homemade-marinade pork galbi set' without hesitation. Then, thinking it might be a teeny bit not enough, we added 1 serving of skirt steak.

The grill, side dishes and sauces are set up right away. There's salt and jangajji (pickles) that go well with meat, plus sides to eat with ssamjang (dipping paste), such as pa-chae (shredded scallion salad), white kimchi and young radish kimchi, and pickled onions, which would be a letdown to miss at a BBQ place.

I picked the lunch special version that comes with doenjang soup + rice, and the amount was just right to eat with the meat. The soup comes in a big bowl, but it's generous with tofu, zucchini, onion and more, and the broth was rich and suited my taste. Since we added skirt steak, we each ate half a bowl of rice, but if we hadn't, the rice alone would have been filling enough.

Marinated pork galbi is all about the marinade

▶ Domestic homemade-marinade pork galbi (2 servings). It seemed to have been soaked well in the marinade, because Yangsimso's signature pork galbi was tender and soft.

I shook the meat around evenly so the marinade wouldn't burn, and took it off onto a plate before it charred.

Marinated pork galbi lives or dies by its marinade, and Yangsimso's homemade marinade is seriously good,, my mom took one bite and said the marinade was delicious and she was happy with it. The great thing about pork is that it's good however you eat it~ thanks to the tasty marinade, it's delicious on its own, wrapped in lettuce, or with pa-chae 😋

Round two: 48-hour aged skirt steak

Personally, when eating plain and marinated meat I prefer plain first, then marinated, but the staff member told us to eat the pork first and the beef after, so we did exactly that :3 Round two is the high-quality skirt steak, if you please. First, swap the grill for a clean one and grill neatly.

Because it's beef, you only need to grill it briefly, so it was definitely faster. Beef is best eaten plain and clean, or dipped in a little salt, haha. Maybe because it's aged 48 hours, as the menu name says, the skirt steak was so tender and soft that it really melted in my mouth,, it's the dish I'd order again next time!

Receipt review event sausage

This is the sausage we got from the receipt review event. It's not a cheap(?) one-bite sausage: it has cheese studded inside, and the texture and juiciness were special for a side dish. (TMI: the sausage skewers sold in front of my school in high school were probably like this,, I remembered the taste of old times.)

That's the end of my review of Yangsimso Ansan Gojan Branch, a Gojan-dong BBQ spot with a well-packed lunch special and quality meat 🤎