Dookbaeki is a relatively new Korean restaurant that opened up August of last year in Coquitlam. It had a 4.5 star review on google so I thought I’d give it a try. When you walk in the set up of the restaurant was quite nice with little fixtures and decorations making it feel like a very traditional Korean place.
When it came to ordering, I had the usual dishes like seafood pancake, japchae (Korean pan fried noodles), steamed dumplings, tonkatsu, and a beef chuck soup. The portion size of the dishes were decent but the tonkatsu was honkin big! Hence my caption! Flavour wise though the overall theme of the entire meal was bland. Everything I ordered needed seasoning.
Their specialty which are soups asked us to add our own salt and pepper to the dish. That to me is a sign of utter laziness. When given a dish at any restaurant, it should be seasoned to a point. Asking the guest to add all the seasoning means they have no idea how to season which was clearly evident in every other dish I ordered. One of their best selling items, the tonkatsu yes had nice presentation with big cuts of butterflied pork, but it was over cooked and made the pork dry. The accompanying sauce on top was completely bizarre and didn’t go with the dish at all. It was too fruity and made the dish inedible. Follow that with the seafood pancake that was crisp on the edges but completely soggy in the middle. Again, completely bland if the sauce that came with it wasn’t used.
Then there was the japchae that had bean curd sheets as a garnish which made the dish so extremely chewy. The noodles that are usually used in a traditional Japchae are chewy enough. Add those bean curd sheets in and I’ll be chewing for an hour. Perhaps the most disappointing was the dumplings which were homemade. It was juicy but again overwhelmingly bland.
A true tragedy. Overall it was a train wreck of a meal. The only good thing was the complimentary storebought probiotic yogurt drink at the end of the meal. When the best part of a meal is something you didn’t even order and they didn’t make, you know that something went wrong. Sad to say I won’t be coming to back to this restaurant. What was a bad experience you had at a restaurant? Comment below!
- Crispiness: 4/10
- Flavour: 2/10
- Texture: 2/10
- Soups: 2/10
- Affordability: Soups-$$/Everything Else-$$$
- Overall: 3/10
- Would I go back: No
Pictures of all the food:
Sogogi-Soontubu Hot Pot
Steamed Pork Dumplings
Vegetarian Japchae
Pork Katsu
Seafood Pancake
Address: 3055 Anson Ave, Coquitlam, BC V3B 2H6
Check out my original post on Instagram:
