Mugaboka - Korean BBQ in Harbor City

Mugaboka is near work, but I have never tasted this Korean BBQ place before. After Six Flags (reviewed next), my wife and I decided to have dinner at Korean BBQ. Since this place was somewhere along the route, we decided to try it and its 16.99 All You Can Eat BBQ. It is located in an unassuming place, not really close to other Korean establishments. The parking is small.

So we arrived there, hungry after not really eating any lunch, actually even in a slight stupor with lack of sugar in our systems. They sat us right away in the front area where the BBQ takes place. In back, they have a more traditional Korean restaurant with stews, soups and tofus. We ordered and there started our grill!

There is our grill with some included sides ... pickled radish, pickled cucumber, kim chi, rice flour cakes, and fish cakes. Yum! They also had a potato salad and seaweed sides.

For a table for 2, they allowed us to pick 4 items as a start, we started with Pork chops, beef tripe, marinated squid and marinated spicy pork. The pork chop and tripe shown here were the star of the 4. The marinated meats were on the sour side, and the squid was not as fresh as I would like.

Black pork belly, YUM! This was good! Also decent here was the boiling egg soup that was included.

This is where things turned wrong.... on our second order, we ordered the black pork belly and then the other three we ordered were I think ... large intestine (pictured), small intestine and stomach. We usually like the fried intestines at restaurants, but eating these were just wrong. They were chewy tubes that couldn't be broken down with slimy interiors. Just thinking about what the inside of an intestine usually holds makes me lose my appetite when trying to eat these. The small intestine is a smaller version of the above, same taste, same aftertaste, same result, yech! The stomach had less of the stench and odor, but still had a horrid aftertaste. We trucked on and on, piece after piece, trying to avoid the 18.99 surcharge for leaving food on the table. We couldn't finish, we failed.

Dinner was finished off with a tea that had rice in it and maybe ginger. Despite having the horrid aftertaste of intestine in our mouths, and our stomachs unable to fit anymore, the tea filtered through rather well, calming the insides and leaving us happy going out the door. Plus on top off that they did not charge the extra fee for food leftover..... (maybe because intestines aren't considered food!)

Overall a good experience, and relatively cheap for all you can eat in the South Bay. Lots of sides and the meat is fresh. One thing, stay away from the intestine! Well, my culinary palette sure doesn't support eating these, or maybe we need to go with someone who knows how to make these things correctly. Maybe small crisp pieces is the way to go? 3 stars out of 5 for this restaurant, would probably make 3.5 out of 5 if we hadn't ordered those darned innards.