Faith and Food Blog

Overview:

Within the Peoria area, there are many different kinds of restaurants that serve Asian cuisines, from sushi bars to Chinese take-out and even Vietnamese dishes. However, it is very hard to find a place that combines each of these into one place. Look no further though than Hokkaido Restaurant on University Street. Hokkaido offers Japanese, Thai, and even Chinese fare in one side, and look to your left and you’ll see the sushi bar. Look even further and you’ll see an area for Chinese hotpot and then next to that a place for Korean BBQ. If you’re trying to decide where to go eat, Hokkaido gives you options to help serve all of these cravings. They offer both dine-in and take-out options for their food as well.

For this blog post, I will be focusing solely on the Korean BBQ portion of the restaurant and going deeper into my experience in that area of the restaurant. For those who are unaware, Korean BBQ is where you grill the meats and other food items yourself by either a stone plate or tray placed on top of a burner in front of you at the table.

*Small tidbit, Chinese hotpot is similar to this, although hotpot encompasses a broth in which you dip the food into*

My Experience:

Despite Hokkaido having so many different options for food, the only thing I have every had from here is the sushi. The sushi itself is pretty good, but that’s not we are going to talk about. I had been craving to go to a Korean BBQ restaurant for almost a year and after finally having the opportunity to go, went all-out. Hokkaido offers various options for their Korean BBQ dining, the most popular being their all you can eat portion that is around $20 during the lunch hours and $30 during dinner. Immediately after arriving, we were seated and began looking at the menu. I was ready to feast.

Most Korean BBQ places have a few staple choices of meats to cook and have a wide selection of sides to go with them, and Hokkaido was no different in this. I have been to a few Korean BBQ restaurants in the past, and I noticed though that Hokkaido had some very minor differences to it despite the food selections being consistent. The main one I had noticed was that when ordering your food, you normally at other places get sides of kimchi, rice, sauces, and other items with your meat automatically, but at Hokkaido, you had to order which ones you wanted. After very quickly looking at the menu though, we decided to order pork belly and bulgogi beef as our meats and then we got sides of crab rangoons, steamed white rice, and fried rice.

After cooking the meats for a bit, we finally were able to start eating and the bulgogi beef had SO much flavor to it. Bulgogi is a very popular Korean savory-sweet sauce that is placed on many different kinds of meat. They were thin pieces of meat too, so it was very easy to eat with the sides of rice and eat a lot of it at once. The pork belly was also good, but it didn’t have as much flavor as the bulgogi beef did. The dipping sauces on the side paired well with it, and the three options for sauces were yum yum sauce, fish oil, and then some sort of barbecue sauce.

After scarfing our food down, we decided to take advantage of it being all you can eat and decided to order some bulgogi pork and another round of steamed rice, as well as an onion volcano and two egg rolls on the side. I already knew the bulgogi was going to be good, and it completely met my expectations. After going through a massive amount of food, I had to go to the gym just to take a walk around the track.

This was a very good meal to have, and for all of the food that we got, the cost was very appropriate and well-worth it. I would recommend trying to go earlier in the day if possible to try and get the lower prices. Though this was not the absolute best Korean BBQ I have ever had, it was still really good and I would definitely go again.

Overall Rating: 8/10