Thank you Cynthia, nice to have a comment from somebody with prior experience to compare our restaurant with.
We had at least 2 orders of bulgogi at my burner (first round, last round and I think one or two mid meal). Sorry, a tiny fraction of the seasoning level I am used to. Seems I last made it before I was keeping a record of recipes on my computer (probably from a printed book), but here is an approximate list of ingredients from a recipe I downloaded in 2017 but apparently never used, that looks familiar to what I used to make, which was similar to what I used to get in a restaurant (I would have used more ginger, small to medium onion and definitely added sesame seeds)
6 small garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons sesame oil
2 teaspoons crushed red pepper
2 teaspoons ginger, freshly grated
1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
1 pound beef, thinly sliced crosswise
1 large onion, cut into 12 wedges
1 tablespoon olive oil
Toasted sesame seeds
I noticed the bulgogi end of the table barely touched their banchan, we pretty much polished ours off.
And I have no clue how the other table and their three burners fared....
We had relatively more sirloin, partly because I snagged over a quarter of it raw, and a bit more rare. Yes, I know the warnings against raw beef, but some sources say cooked anything less than "shoe leather" is no better than raw for killing potentially bad bacteria...and the cave man in me loves it raw.
Now I remember guessing the other buffet fried item was pork at the time, but forgot when posting. What was the dish with rice noodles, veggies and meat? Somebody said the name, but I forgot.
When I went in to ask and plan, they were quite clear that the food was cooked in back and brought out for the AYCE. But I went in mid day, so that probably only applies to lunch and maybe only to the $20 lunch special.
What I had attempted to do was place an initial order for each burner, of the basic beef items, then let everybody reorder what they liked, or choose other specialty items that maybe not everybody would want. But I may have failed to communicate that to the servers, and, I guess, wasn't clear enough with the guests. If I did all the ordering, I would have picked a bunch of the oddball items that those at some burners would have not touched. And if I had to do all the ordering, I would not have had time to eat anything myself, maybe a good thing in disguise, though my weight was NOT up the next two days after.
Do you know what the buffet item "flat processed meat folded back and forth on a skewer" that I thought resembled spam was? Or the bowls to which we added broth to make "fresh" soup? There seemed to be two broth selections, one with jalapeno like peppers in it (but still mild to my taste).
Late in the evening, I noticed that one of the other tables had one grill that was a very open mesh (that I could see through clearly) instead of solid steel with slots we had. I wonder if they just ran out of the standard ones, if it was a special request item, or if they had some special dish that required that.
--Carey aka underdog