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A few weeks ago, Pere and I had tickets to see the Shanghai acrobats perform at the new Mesa Arts Center in downtown Mesa. If you've never been to the Arts Center, you owe it to yourself to check it out - even if you aren't catching a performance there. It is absolutely the finest building (architecturally) in Mesa, and one of the finest in all of Arizona. It also happens to be the largest arts center in the state.

Since Pere was coming from North Scottsdale and I from Chandler, we decided to meet for dinner somewhere in Mesa before the show. If you've never been to Mesa before, it isn't exactly a mecca for fine dining. In fact, once you rule out corporate chains, it gets difficult to find much else. One place I have been meaning to try, though, is a place called Korean BBQ on Alma School and Guadalupe. I hadn't had Korean in a while, and with the weather getting cooler at night, I'd been in the mood for the type of comfort food that Korean dining provides.

We ended up meeting around 6:15 or so and had the place virtually to ourselves for half of the meal. The restaurant is tucked away in the corner of a strip mall, but that shouldn't surprise anyone given that's standard for most Arizona restaurants. The interior decor is sparse, but tasteful. One thing I like about Korean BBQ is that they have the tables with the built in grills for grilling your own meat. I'd say the Korean restaurants in Arizona are split about 50/50 on places that do vs. places that don't. Since this was Pere's first experience with a Korean restaurant (we've cooked a few Korean dishes at home), I thought she should have the full effect.

We started off by ordering OB (Oriental Brewery), an import from Korea. Made with rice, it's essentially Korea's answer to Budweiser. It tasted very similar. Very light and easy to drink, but essentially flavorless. Since it was also happy hour while we were there, our waitress informed us that our beers came with free sake (presumably for sake bombers). The sake was unremarkable. We didn't bomb them this time around and instead sipped them throughout our meal.

After looking over the menu, we decided to split three dishes. I knew it was probably going to be too much food, but I wanted variety! We ordered Bul Gogi (thinly sliced marinated sirloin), Bibim Bap (stone bowl filled with rice, beef, vegetables, seaweed and a fried egg) , and Haemul Pajun (rice flour pancake with spring onions and seafood).

The first item to arrive at our table was the Bul Gogi. Our waitress placed all of the meat on the grill at once. The result was that all of the meat was done at the same time. I would have preferred to grill the meat in smaller batches so that we didn't end up with a big pile of meat that was mostly cold by the time we got to it. Grilling preference aside, the meat was nicely marinated and very tender and juicy when grilled. Wrapped in lettuce and

Next up was the Bibim Bap, a stone bowl beautifully presented with rice, beef, jullianed veggies, seaweed, and a fried egg. The funny thing about Bibim Bap is that in order to eat it, you basically take all of the arranged items in the bowl, add a bunch of sauce, and mix it all together. The end result is quite tasty, especially the crispy bits of rice scraped up from the bottom of the bowl.

Our third dish was the Haemul Pajun. When the waitress put it down on the table, I knew right away that there was no way we were going to finish all of the food we ordered. The Haemul Pajun was the size of a medium pizza. It was topped with spring onions and stuffed with squid and octopus. Overall, the pancake was really good. The seafood inside was a little on the chewy side, but the overall flavor, when accented with the dipping sauce our waitress provided was quite tasty. We finished as much as we could and asked the waitress to box up the rest.

Unfortunately, we were too full for desert. This has always been the case for me when I've had Korean food. There's just so much that's available as part of the meal, I've never managed to save enough room for desert. All in all, our meal at Korean BBQ was good. I still need more experience with Korean food outside of Arizona before I can really say what's really good and what's not outside of the limited experiences I've had so far.