Editor’s note: This week, we continue our countdown of Portland’s best new restaurants of 2023. At No. 2: Jeju, a whole animal Korean barbecue restaurant where spontaneous karaoke has been known to break out.
A fog machine went off halfway through dinner at this new Korean barbecue restaurant from Han Oak’s Sun Young Park and Peter Cho, shooting steam through colored lights toward a hushed dining room. It felt like a mistake, or a test run.
Then, just as suddenly: a dropdown screen, wireless microphones and a karaoke outbreak. Specifically, The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” as performed by artist Carson Ellis and her husband, The Decemberists’ own Colin Meloy. A few diners paused between bites of lacy beef mandu and dry-aged kanpachi. Others reacted to the duet with polite indifference. (I stood the whole time, shooting video.)
After the show — and note, there might not always be a show; Jeju is nearly as ad hoc as Han Oak — came the main event, a ssam course of quality meat, fresh lettuce and sticky rice paper, herbs and sauces and other accoutrements for forming wraps. The guiding principle here is whole animal butchery, meaning cow and pig primals are broken down in the back, dry-aged in-house, seared by chef Ben Klein and his team. Each night’s ssam course usually has some steak, some pork and perhaps some blood sausage, but specific cuts change day-to-day.
Meals start with a quartet of banchan. On my most recent visit, that meant simple napa and daikon kimchi, squash blanketed with hazelnut chile crisp, flash-fried cauliflower and broccoli with a buttermilk tofu whip and classic Korean steamed eggs in anchovy broth, here with cured roe. Don’t stand on ceremony — besides the kimchi, which you can save for your ssam, the souffle-like eggs and that frothy tofu whip are best eaten right away, and refills will be offered. These are the best banchan I’ve had from a Cho-Park joint.
Next, beefy dumplings crowned with a latticework of fried starch, thicker and crunchier than the lacy crown atop the winged gyoza at nearby Afuri, and an ideal vehicle for beef trimmings that don’t make it onto the ssam. For the Korean sashimi, or hue, Jeju dry ages whole Hawaiian kanpachi in-house, giving the raw fish added firmness and deepening the flavor, a practice I first encountered at the innovative Los Angeles Thai restaurant Anajak.
Han Oak owners Peter Cho and Sun Young Park sit at their new Korean barbecue restaurant, Jeju.Michael Russell | The Oregonian
Jeju sits at the nexus of a few national trends: the efforts to design a more sustinable steakhouse by using the entire cow, not just luxury cuts — an approach we’ve been advocating advocating for in these pages since first trying Seattle’s Bateau in 2017 — and to elevate Korean barbecue from an all-you-can-eat sprint into something more refined.
I’ve tried several restaurants seeking to do the latter, and I have occasionally walked away wondering whether they’ve missed what makes Korean BBQ great, specifically, to my mind, the sizzling meat, fresh herbs and funky sauce combine to explode through their shawl of undressed lettuce. San Ho Won, Benu chef Corey Lee’s award-winning San Francisco take on the genre, leaned too far toward fine-dining decadence for my taste, with a signature double cut galbi so intensely rendered it dissolved in its wrap like so much meat gelatin.
Jeju goes in a different direction, cooking its meat in the wood-fired hearth, letting it rest, then slicing and arranging each steak, sausage and slab of house bacon on a platter before its brought to the table. The cook time is an ideal mid-rare, but I have longed for a bit more heat and char from the beef once its nestled in its lettuce wrap. For your first wrap, reach instead for a square of rice paper peeled from from its sticky note pad, then slather on a healthy dab of of ssamjang, the fermented soy bean paste. Pork — including that delicious bacon and a nightly sausage — fare better.
Without installing hundreds of thousands of dollars in tabletop grills and industrial-strength ventilation hoods, ala the Korean steakhouse chain Cote, this is probably the best approach for Jeju to take, especially considering the gorgeous wood-fired hearth and oven inherited here in the former Renata space. And with that quibble aside, the meat quality here is obviously unparalleled among local Korean barbecue spots, something that stood out even more starkly while warming up leftovers the next day. Meanwhile, the price — $75 per person — is surprisingly affordable. Consider that Ox’s similarly sized Asado Argentino platter costs $120 and comes with salad and fried potatoes, while Jeju’s ssam is just one part of a multi-course meal.
And on a return visit earlier this month, I found nearly everything had been dialed in, from the seasoning on the banchan to the dumplings’ more delicate crunch to the gently smoky flavor imparted to the meat. And I haven’t even mentioned what might end up being your favorite bite of the night, buttered multigrain rice that gets crisped, dolsot-style, in Jeju’s wood-fired oven.
“You don’t want to know how much butter is in there,” Cho said as he passed by our table.
Meanwhile, another brave singer stepped to the mic.
What to know: Order a bottle of soju, and it just might come with a special treat — a frog-shaped, motion-detecting spout that shoots a single shot of rice wine into your glass (or onto your table) with the brush of a finger.
What to eat: Jeju has stuck with its $75 tasting menu so far, meaning meals progress from banchan to mandu in black vinegar to dry-aged kanpachi under a daikon nest to the ssam set with its daily meats. My only advice? Save room for that buttered rice and dessert, especially the seasonal bingsu, the snowy Korean shaved ice.
Further reading: With Jeju, Han Oak team seeks more sustainable approach to Korean barbecue
Jeju is open for dinner Wednesday-Saturday at 626 S.E. Main St., 503-502-2038, jejupdx.com.
— Michael Russell; mrussell@oregonian.com