Burning X Korean BBQ

Burning X Korean BBQ is the latest incarnation of an all-you-can-eat barbecue buffet in Tustin’s Red Hill Plaza, previously known as SongHak Korean BBQ, and before that, Seoul Garden. Whereas SongHak awkwardly pushed expensive a la carte alternatives to the AYCE experience that had worked for decades at Seoul Garden, Burning X has dropped a la carte service in favor of a purely AYCE and buffet offering. It’s not as flush with choices or as affordable as Seoul Garden was, but it’s somewhere between “OK” and “good.”

Like SongHak, Burning X has three price points – the details are provided on a web page accessed through a QR code at your table. For $22 per person, groups of two or more people can have a “semi buffet all you can eat” lunch special, Monday through Friday, with a choice of 31 items (up from SongHak’s 29). For $30 per person, including solo diners at lunch or everyone at dinner, a “signature” menu includes 37 items (up $3 and down from 44 items at SongHak), while a $39 per person “premium” version has 46 items (same price but down from 57 items at SongHak). The restaurant’s rules disallow solo diners on weekend and holiday dinners, presumably because all of its barbecue grill tables are sized for four or more people, so seating one person may mean giving up the ability to seat two or three more. Whether Burning X enforces that rule, as SongHak disturbingly did with a sign in its entryway, remains to be seen.

When we visited for lunch, Burning X’s buffet tables weren’t overflowing with choices – left and right stations mirrored each other, and had gaps where additional dishes might go at night – but there were plenty of choices, most of them heavily obscured by marinades. We grabbed a bunch of different items to suss out over the BBQ’s flames, and found that the buffet meats tended to be extremely fatty cuts, sliced and sauced to obscure that detail, though they all tasted really quite good thanks to the varied sauces (spicy gochujang, soy-ginger, mustard, “Caribbean,” and garlic butter). Notably, seafood is all but absent from Burning X’s menu, with very limited (and small) shrimp options available at the middle and high tiers; Seoul Garden’s AYCE octopus, squid, fish, and other exotics (organ meats) are nowhere to be found here.