Arirang Restaurant

Really great servicr and the food was really tasty! Thank you for an enjoyable experience!

Came in for a bite to eat and was asked if we wanted lunch or to grill. We didn’t know. We were sat at a grill top table. We ended up not ordering anything to grill at the table. I got a beef bulgogi which I shared with my daughter. My husband got oxtail soup. He asked if they had fish sauce. They said no but told him he can bring it next time. They gave us a bowl to put some if the food into for our daughter. The customer service is very good. They are very nice and will gladly make help decide if you are having trouble deciding. We look forward to coming here again.

I ate here twice & both times my boyfriend & I somewhat enjoyed the food, flavor wise. I’m Korean so I could read the package deals they have written in Korean but even still the portions were just too small.
The samgyupsal (pork belly) was not bad for what it was, a bit on the thinner side but we ate it just fine. The kalbi (marinated short rib meat) was also not bad flavor wise, have had better, but again the portions for the price pissed me off.
The banchans (side dishes) were nothing special as well. The kimchi didn’t look or taste fresh.
The dolsot bibimbap (stone bowl rice w/​meat & veg) was a let down due to their weak variation of veggies and unporportioned ratio of meat and rice.
I felt happier after I drank my bottle of soju. sadly the food tasted a little better when I was drunk lol.
Customer service wise I didn’t have any bad experiences, the ajjumas tended to us when they could.

Great food, great price. The kimchi chigae is great for the Chicagoland area. The service is iffy, but if you want good food, this is the place. Order «Korean Style» which is: ORDER EVERYTHING AT ONCE FOR EVERYONE AT THE TABLE. Don’t order appetizer and drinks first. Get it all. This may help with any «service problems». Their beef is melt in you rmoth good. Great seasoning. Try bulgogi and dlosot bibimbop for newbies. If more spicy, then Kimchi Chigae (kimchi stew).

Came here at 11am on a Sunday. Although options were limited, the kimchi jigae was the best I’ve had out here in the midwest. Hubby and I will definitely come back and try the kbbbq. Prices are on par with the rest back home in Cali, with the jigae running about $ 10. Service was slow, but friendly.

BAD SERVICE!!! They serve traditional Korean food but they taste average typical Korean restaurant. Nothing fancy or special about this restaurant.
Receiptionist burp out loud at the counter while customers are eating. Server came and ask if I needed anything, I asked her for refill on one side dish. She told me to finish it first for refill. Why in the hell she ask if I needed anything if she wasn’t going to give it to me??? Bad bad service. They ought know that customers comes first in the business.

Can not emphasize enough about how bad the service has gotten. Even if the food was twice as good as it is, still not worth the horrible service and experience of dining here. I wouldn’t go back if they were the last standing Korean restaurant on the planet.
I’d be embarrassed to run this place and would probably shut it down if it was up to me.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.

This is the worst Korean restaurant I’ve been to! I went there last Friday and split the check with a couple of my friends. My share of the check was $ 17.26, so I wrote down $ 18.50 as the final amount on the merchant’s receipt as I was planning to pay $ 1.25 for the tip. However, when I checked my credit card statement a few days later, this restaurant charged me a total of $ 35.76! For some weird reasons, they thought I am paying $ 18.50 in tip, even though my food only cost $ 17.50! Come on guys, you are not a fabulous restaurant with awesome customer service, why would I pay you so much tip?! By the way, the food was bland and mediocre. I will never come back here, ever! I also wouldn’t recommend this restaurant to any of my friends.

A good place pre-​King Spa! I forgot how these BBQ places worked: you decide to have the BBQ and sit at a table with an open fire mini-​pit (gas) and with the wait staff you cook your own meat. It is not the fastest place as others have noted but I found that this was not bothersome in line with the day (spa days are slow days) and isn’t it perhaps a feature of non-​American cultures to take time to eat? Anyways it didn’t bother me this day. The full BBQ plates were intimidatingly expensive compared to the lunch specials, but then you get a huge spread of sides and soup as well, more than filling! A fun place for a slow-​cook and chat with friends, trying something new.

Love this place! Soon tofu soup with beef is so good! The broth is one of the best I’ve had. Their fried mackerel is delicious, a big portion, crispy and not overcooked. Plus the purple rice is like a bonus!

Our server was very friendly and offered us a refill on a chicken teriyaki for one of our children since he ate his plate quickly. Although we were given good customer service, the food was clearly reheated, as six entrées that we ordered came out in less than five minutes. One of our plates was served cold, and our soups were room temperature.

Wanted to warn people about the pitfalls if this restaurant, just in case you are thinking of dining out at this place.
1) The service was very slow. Had to wait a good 25 minutes before the food actually came out. Kind of felt bad for the waitor who tried to make up to us by refilling our cups of water which we kept drinking due to our hunger. We had ordered seol lung tang and oh sam bul and thought that maybe the meat was being cooked, hence the long wait. What we got almost a half and hour after we ordered was the seol lung tang and the ban chan. And then shortly after to our surprise was a pan of uncooked meats and vegetables of oh sam bul. We had to cook this meat ourselves which is important because…
2) The restaurant makes you pay a compulsatory 18% gratuity fee if you have a party of 5 or more. I went with my family of 5 and 3 out of the 5 parties were kids. They were not adults and should not be counted as a head. Furthermore, if they were doing extra service for us, I would understand the tip adding but there was no extra service provided for us which we deemed as ridiculous.
3) The restaurant makes you pay $ 1.50 for every extra bowl of rice you order. The problem with this was we were only given 3 bowls of rice even though we had a party of 5. How does this make sense? If they were going to give us only 3 bowls maybe they shouldn’t have charged the group as a party of 5 and made us pay the compulsatory tip. Which is not to say, $ 1.50 should not be charged in the first place! I don’t know if management has changed but when we were here a few years back, the bowls of rice were refilled without pay. It’s like the unlimited bread sticks at a Italian restaurant!
4) The eating utensils had smudges. Enough said.
All in all I would not recommend this place unless one wants an uncomfortable, unpleasant experience.

Horrible place to eat. Service is something that they’ve never heard of. Can’t request any sides. They gave lame excuses of being out what was requested. I was even told no to one side without an explanation. I wanted the heat on my grill higher but the waitress kept turning it down. Seemed like a tactic to make my group become more full with the small portions that they served. After this horrible service they were demanding a 15% tip. No where in the restaurant does it say that there is any type of tip required. They tried to calculate it for me a kept asking for it and I just refused. By no means do I ever act like this but they did non deserve anything extra. Please don’t go to this place.

First time back in over a year’s time. Service was very poor. There was ONE waitress taking care of the entire restaurant. The table adjoining ours was filled with dirty dishes and leftover food that remained there until we were almost done… certainly NOT very appetizing at all. I ordered an iced tea to drink and was given a watery warm green tea which I could not drink period. Finally had to order Coke in a can. Meats were very fatty. Hard to find waitress to ask for more sides. Not a fan anymore. Sorry!

I’ve tried this place twice and was disappointed each time. I don’t know what’s up with the place but if you go during the end of the night (around 1 – 2 hours before close) the service becomes pretty crappy. The first time, we got there probably 2 hours before closing and ordered some kalbi and some stews. The server seemed extremely annoyed to have another table to serve. I’m used to subpar service at Korean restaurants, but this was on another level. I don’t even want to mention the way she spoke to us and the way she made us feel.
The second time, we just wanted something quick to eat around the area so we gave it another try. We got there around 30 – 45 minutes before closing. The same server lady from before sat us at a table and handed us the menu. After looking through the menu for about a minute, she told us that the only thing we could order was the bibimbap (rice topped with side dishes). She said all the cooks left and all they could make was the bibimbap. What the heck! I just wanted a simple Korean soup or something. She told us to go to another restaurant, so we did. Never will I try this place again…
As a Korean guy, I’m embarrased for this place…

I do not recommend this place at all. Years ago I came here because I liked the meat. But a month ago and was extremely disappointed. We got galbi, which came out so late. We had to keep asking for water but didn’t come even after ringing the bell 3 times. The waitresses would pass by our table and without asking if we needed anything. There were only two waitresses on a weekend. I would understand if there were a lot of ppl. But there were only 4 tables filled that day. I also ordered the dakdori tang, which was mediocre. Not really flavorful I took it home and didn’t even end up eating it.
I don’t ever plan on going there again. Service was terrible.

About a 2 – 2.5: I came here with my mom and my husband for lunch on a weekend. I ordered the So Gogi Dol Suht Bi Bim Bop, which came in a clay-​oven bowl full of rice, seasoned spinach, slices of mushrooms, thin slices of bulgogi pieces, a yolk of an egg, and bean sprouts. There is a small ketchup bottle-​sized red pepper bean paste in which you squirt in the bowl to mix it all up. I thought the sauce was way too sweet, so I wasn’t a fan of that. The rice was overdone and was very wet as they had put too much water in the ricecooker. My mom ordered the Kong Bee Jee, which was like a tofu porridge. It was bland and quite underseasoned. My husband ordered the Bi Bim Neng Myun, which was basically red bean pepper paste-​like sauce which is mixed with the buckwheat noodles, which was okay. Out of all the banchans, I preferred the mook with soy sauce with scallions drizzled on top, even though theirs was dry. The ggakdoogi was good and well-​fermented, so that was a plus! I’m glad I was able to check this place out, but not sure if I’d go back!
+underwhelming Korean food T_​_​_​_​T

I’ll keep it short and salty.
The service is slow, at best, and rarely do the servers check up on you to take your order or to give you your check let alone get you more water. The prices are comparable to other Korean restaurants in Chicagoland but honestly, the quality is just okay.
I wouldn’t go out of my way to come here and the few times I did drop by were either before or after shopping at H-​Mart but maybe it would be better to just eat the H-​Mart food court or just eat a different cuisine all together.

Oh god. Never again will I visit this place.
I thought I’d give this place a try.
Hey, it’s about 2 minutes from my place, I’m Korean, it’s Korean food — what can go wrong?
EVERYTHING.
First off, there was a sewage-​y smell going on because something was wrong with the plumbing (and yet we were seated right next to smelly area despite there being like 3 other tables full at lunch time).
So we move our butts over to a window seat and order.
The food was disgusting — the meats were more fat than actual meat, they got our dishes wrong and just stared at us stupidly when we told them and then took ages to bring out the correct items. The Korean waitress seemed more concerned with puttering about the front area doing nothing and the Mexican waitress (?) had her two little kids running up to her and would go away. In the middle of serving our food. Think of how sad my poor little bowl of rice and jjigae would have felt.
And to top off our lovely meal, we found we were overcharged for our meals.
Yes, they changed it to the correct price but really? You’d think they’d pay a little more attention — especially after that little fiasco with the food.

Went here after a morning of relaxation at King Spa. We went at 1 PM on a Wednesday and there were probably 3 or 4 groups there. Pretty large space for a very little following. But it could be different on the weekend, I don’t know.
We were seated right away, were served hot tea (in glass cups for whatever reason, it was too hot to hold properly), and the waitress promptly took our orders. She seemed nice enough. But after bringing our food to us she kind of disappeared somewhere and if she did magically appear to clear off another table or see another customer, it was hard to get her attention. She checked up on us on her own just once during the whole meal. I’m usually accustomed to being checked up on at least 2 or 3 times. There weren’t even many people there.
I ordered Seollongtang (). I consider myself a connoisseur of Seollongtang (Not really, but I generally do order it at every Korean restaurant I go to), so I’ve been around. I probably would have been better off eating at King Spa or H-​Mart because it was nothing spectacular. The broth tasted a bit watery and not too flavorful. I don’t know if it was because they knew I wasn’t Korean or what but the waitress didn’t serve it with rice. I’ve had this dish in different places and I’ve always had it with rice. When I asked her if she could bring me some she looked at me and kind of laughed like, «Oh, so she does know how to eat it.» And she continued to giggle as she gave me rice.
The three stars is mainly because of the service because it felt a bit lacking in some areas. The only thing it’s got going for itself are their fairly cheap prices. If I had a better experience here and they had delicious, to-​die-​for food, I probably would prefer going here instead of eating inside King Spa where the prices are much higher.