Anthey C.
Yelp
So I heard a lot of good things and saw a lot of drool-worthy pictures/videos of this new place; sister to Daldongnae. However, my expectations fell short as my experience here was not that good. To start, parking was very hard to find. The banner on the restaurant that says that there is parking at the rear (just like their sister restaurant) but the 'rear' is actually a paid parking area for the place next to Gui Gui. I would recommend not turning in as it is one way, very tight and there is a lack of spots available. All the spots were taken and many of the spots were allocated to customers of a different place. We even went further down to find their actual 'rear' but weren't able. Luckily, there is a Tim Hortons/Pizza Pizza plaza that is about a 2-minute walk with plenty of spots available.
We arrived around 7 PM and did not need to wait for a spot. For COVID measures, they ask you to sanitize and record your name. Patio seating is available as well. We chose to dine in since it was pretty cold outside. The restaurant itself is pretty tight when you walk through to go to a table but they do have barriers that separate tables from each other. They provide a paper menu that you can check off and we picked a couple of the skewered meats, rice, and soup. Gui Gui also has tabletop cooking available with a min. of 2 orders like most places. They give you four side dishes: house salad, japchae, spicy cucumbers, and one more (hard to tell what it was) and each person gets a tray of 3 dips/powder.
Skewers (All the ones we ordered were 6.95/4 skewers)
The portion of the meat cubes is very minuscule (smaller than a dice) and to make it worst, some of the cubes were pure fat which I felt could have been avoidable since fat and meat look very different when raw so that should have been visible when they are preparing their cuts. Some of the pieces were also poorly cut and so we would have some with pieces falling apart and not rotating properly because of the uneven weight distribution. I would not be surprised if these were the end pieces to the nicer looking cuts they serve at Daldongnae that were gathered. The (marinated) Beef Galbi and (spicy) Lamb were good aside from those factors. We also tried the teriyaki chicken leg (comes with spring onions) and gochujang pork; both were so-so. Each order came with 4 skewers with approx 4 cubes of meat. Due to the quality and size of the meat, we did not think it matched its cost. TIP: when you finish cooking the skewers, you can place them on the top rack - this was not mentioned by our server but I think that is what it was for. This also helps to maintain the warmth of the skewer.
Skewered Oden Soup $8.95
This was served in a large hot pot with a large ladle and a pile of red pepper powder in the middle. Usually, you see the skewers of this dish sticking out but unfortunately, the skewers were submerged by the time this dish was served to us. Oden is a Japanese one-pot dish consisting of several ingredients such as boiled eggs, daikon, konjac, and processed fishcakes stewed in a light, soy-flavored dashi broth. But this only had fishcakes and fish balls which made it also very underwhelming. Although the pepper powder made the dish look nice, it became a miss towards the end because it lingered at the bottom and did not dissolve. It would have been better if they used a paste instead or serve the powder on the side because they give a lot of it inside the soup.
Egg and Shrimp fried rice $9.95
This was ok. The rice sticks onto the stone bowl just like a clay pot rice do which was nice. However, we found it pretty underwhelming for $9.95 and it was quite oily. In addition, the egg was pretty overcooked.
The service was okay but the only times that they checked on us was when they were serving food. They asked if it was our first time and showed us how to use the contraption but they had difficulty in making it work (pretty rushed). There is also a sign on the wall about cooking time but it is easy to miss since it uses very small print. It was kind of strange that the sign said beef and lamb would take 8-10 minutes and chicken leg would take 5 minutes because the beef and lamb cooked a lot faster. The fire also hits the spot with more sauce/marinade dripping so some areas may burn quicker than others. They also warn you that overcooking it would dry the meat up. People mention that there is space to put about 10 skewers but it is not ideal to fill up all the spaces since it because very tight. This style of cooking is definitely not ideal for parties over 2 especially if you are hungry.
Although the concept of automatic rotational cooking is cool, we felt that there were a lot of downfalls to it and it isn't big enough to execute properly. It also gets very hot because of the fire. Overall, I would give it a 2.5/5. I am not in a hurry to return here and we left feeling disappointed. We prefer their sister location which is just down the road. (Sept 14, 2020)
