Hong Depot is a recently opened Korean restaurant in West End. You can't really miss it, occupying a prime position on the corner of Melbourne and Boundary streets that was once a petrol station. The Brisbane CBD is absolutely full of Korean restaurants, but this seems to be the first one that has ventured over to West End. Hong Depot offers small lunch options and their dinner menu consists of only Korean barbeque.
The restaurant is open air, with roller door style windows that allow fresh air to enter, and for smoke from the constant barbequing to flow out. There are alien like copper vents over every table which are able to be pulled directly over your grill to vacuum up all the smokiness.
The Korean barbeque menu has several different meat options, all mostly beef. Now for the Korean barbeque fans out there, this will disappoint. You can go into the city or out to Sunnybank and have a much more extensive menu with a variety of different meats and offal. We got the impression with Hong Depot, that they were trying to "dumb down" Korean barbeque in order to appeal to the masses.
L and I had a combination BBQ option, although we aren't sure of the exact name of the meal (it was quite a while ago that we ate there). This included three different types of beef to share, one being wagyu steak. This was accompanied by a salad, which was very basic, mixed lettuce and tomato, plus a tiny offering of kimchi. Whilst we were awaiting our meat, our waitress brought out a bowl of rice, seaweed and pickles and taught us how to roll our own rice balls. This was a bit of a novelty, and L certainly made some fantastic looking rice balls for me.
We also ordered some dumplings to start with. These were pan fried and came out simmering amongst bean sprouts. They were tasty enough but had no sauce to accompany them.
Our meats then arrived and our grill was ready to go. There were three types of beef as stated above, and a variety of vegetables including onion, capsicum, mushrooms, pumpkin, potato and asparagus. We had a bit of fun grilling up our meats. Our waitress thankfully grilled our wagyu steak for us, as we were concerned we would overcook this as it was clearly the best part. The meat was really tender and had that buttery fatty wagyu flavour. Our other beef included a more plain unmarinated cut, and then marinated bulgogi beef. Accompanying sauces were a chilli/bean, sweet soy sauce, and salted sesame oil.
We were worried that the amount of food might not be enough to fill us, but we were comfortably full at the end of the meal. We were glad we ordered the dumplings to eat before the barbeque, this was definitely necessary.
We are by no means experts in Korean Barbeque but even we can see that Hong Depot is probably not that appealing to someone who eats it often. The barbeque meats were good, but the overall meal could be better value for money by having more meat, and differing types of meat on offer. As above, Hong Depot seems to be Korean barbeque simplified for the masses. It was definitely expensive for what we recieved (paying about $26-$28 each for our combination barbeque). Next time we feel like trying out Korean barbeque, we will likely go elsewhere.
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