REVIEW | Bryan's BBQ - Korean AYCE with more restrictions than options

A group of us went to eat at Bryan's BBQ after we discovered Joon's Restaurant (read about it here) was closed every second and fourth Tuesdays. There are a ton of Korean restaurants in the Bloor and Christie area but Bryan's happened to be across the street and they had an all you can eat barbeque so we decided to give it a try.

Photo from BlogTO


It's been a while since I've had All-You-Can-Eat (AYCE) and when I do it's normally Japanese, which tends to be pretty good with a wide of variety of food to choose from. However, we left Bryan's BBQ less than satisfied. 

There are two options if you decide to have AYCE. Special #1 is available at $18.99 and with this combo you get a random assortment of meats that comprises of beef, chicken and pork. At least we know we're not getting some random meat dish.   The other option, Special #2 gives you more of a flexibility in that you can choose which meats to BBQ.

We went with Special #1, as we were not picky with what we wanted and really, how can it go wrong - we all enjoy different types of meat and don't mind surprises. However, we spoke a little too soon... eating AYCE at Bryan's BBQ had a lot of restrictions and limitations.  We felt like we were 5-years old all over again except replace the vegetables with the meat!

Here are some rules to their AYCE: 
1. The restaurant dictates the order of the meat you are serviced, which is fine because we knew that ahead of time.

2. You cannot order the same meat that you just had, meaning you can't order beef again if you just had beef. You have to order the exact order of pork, chicken and then beef. If you only want beef after the first round of order, you would have to eat pork and chicken before the second helpings of beef.

3. Each meat plate is huge in portion - we started off with pork and chicken and we were told that we had to finish all the pork and chicken before the beef dish would come out. Saying that the plate of chicken was massive is probably an understatement and there was probably enough to feed at least 10 people. 

We wanted the beef so we had no other option but to finish the chicken and pork. When we finally finished everything, the beef was brought out. According to the waitress, if the raw beef meats are left untouched & uncooked, we won't be charged extra... good to know...

It seems that this is the restaurant's antic to fill up diners with the chicken and pork so they don't eat as much beef...  It certainly worked because we were unable to eat it all. The beef itself, however was quite bland and tough so wasn't even really worth consuming all that chicken and pork for.

We were pretty surprised that the restaurant was full on a random Tuesday night but there is only one girl working the entire restaurant. Her service wasn't bad but she didn't have the time to attend to each table when they had requests. 

I will not return to Bryan's BBQ for their All-You-Can-Eat in the future. They also offer an a la carte menu but as we didn't order from that menu, I cannot comment on the quality of those food items.

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