Albene

You’d have to be a fob aching to return to Korea for you to eat at this place. The food is crappy, service is alright, and the price is not justified. For example, we ordered about 11 dishes (party of 12) and 3 of them was «tang soo yook». Well, this tang soo yook sauce was 100% ketchup based pumped full of sugar, msg and pineapple. A lot of the food was bland; nothing really special about this place. If you are craving for Korean try the food court inside of the Hannam market, although not the best, it’s much better than this shithole.

Normally, I wouldn’t be in this part of the town. In fact, I did not even considered this part of the city to be in Buena Park. Strangely it looked more like La Mirada with their brand new houses that was built and other newer places at the surrounding neighborhood.
Albene has this funny looking sport fan figure as a mascot on their sign. There is a popular 24 hour joint in LA’s K-​town that a lot of college kids frequent. I was just a bit surprised to see a brand new one opened up in La Mirada (ok ok, Buena Park) at next door to Paris Baguette. It’s inside of a brand new galleria next door to Han Nam Supermarket.
The place still has a brand new look and smell to it as there is a shinny new wooden floor with a freshly painted walls. It’s definitely not ghetto looking like the one in K-​town. There are some noticeable differences between the two Albene.
One is that there is a real nice looking menu to read through where as the K-​town has the big tacky sign to order from. Instead of a plastic cup, you get a stainless steel tea cup for drinking water. That was something unique.
Obviously with the Chinese food served in Korean style, I had to remembered on how spicy Albene could served their food. I checked the menu where Beebimbp (pot dishes), noodles, and beef/​chicken are primarily displayed. There are also several dumplings dishes that caught my attention.
I took the cheap way out by ordering bulgolbi (beef) and dumplings for my dinner. The great thing about coming here was the service. Absolutely friendly and accommodating in every way. Obviously can’t speak a lick of Korean to save my life, but they were friendly in helping me getting my order.
It’s probably a subtle difference between the OC and K-​town where manners and service was very noticeable. Even the other table have gotten polite greetings and quick service.
There’s about 5 banchans (side dishes), soup, and a little salad (big lettuce) that goes along with your dinner. Without hesitation, the bean sprouts is always the first to go if it was placed in front of me. Nothing will change that.
The other big difference is… this place is really mellow. As in like… not very loud. So I guess I can’t set up a UYE here as we will destroy that peaceful tranquility that was here. Yeah, the ambiance is really eerily quiet for some reason. It’s not like nobody talked, it’s just not very noisy at all.
Overall, I gotten great service with nice meal to go along with it. I’ll probably come back to try their noodle soup dishes as it looked very good on the next table. Take advantage of their 20% discount while it last as it might be a special that is not going to last very long.
Oh, I noticed they don’t have a credit card machine yet. So take some cash with you.