Cuisine: Korean
The first thing you need to know about The Moon is that you will occasionally be served by a robot. It’s kind of a half-assed robot — one that is not so great at going to the right table and will sometimes show up empty-handed — but I sensed that our human server was perhaps a little miffed at its presence. Like if we weren’t there she might have smacked it with a spoon or kicked it with her tiny shoe. It’s bad enough that this joint is pretty much a self-serve buffet, the cranky waitress is splitting her paltry tips with a mech. Or at least that’s what I assume accounted for her less-than-committed dedication to our lunch enjoyment. Stupid robots.
Yes, The Moon is an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ joint in a strip mall in Hackensack. It’s a sprawling dining room that reminds me of the “restaurants” you’d find at one of those waterslide resorts in PA. Kind of generic and like somewhere an accounting firm might hold a banquet in 1996. It’s just not exactly the coziest or most considered space. It’s an aesthetic a robot might not raise a stink about, I suppose. We came for lunch on a Saturday, which was pretty sleepy. I imagine this place gets more packed for a weekend dinner, though. Again, the server seemed annoyed that we’d even booked a time, but perhaps she was just having a bad day. We went with the bbq over the hot pot option. Mostly because none of us understands how a hot pot works. The issue is, we also didn’t really understand how the barbecue portion worked either. Because, for the 47th time, the server did absolutely no preamble or explanation of which meats we could choose from, how the self-grilling thing worked or pretty much anything else. We tried, she resisted. Which makes me think the usual diners are either regulars, or just not stupid white people like us. To that end, I think we missed out on several of the meats we could have chosen from. Our bad. But also her bad. And the useless robot, of course.
But, essentially, you sit down, choose if you want barbecue or hot pot, tell the server what kind of meat you want from the menu for your first go ’round and then go grab accoutrement. The issue being, it’s unclear what stuff is for the hot pot and what stuff is for the barbecue. I mean, theoretically you can throw anything on a grill. However, calamari does not work. It’s like grilling rubber bands. Honestly, most of the seafood related stuff doesn’t work. It seems, wandering around the buffets, that most of the items are actually meant to be thrown in the boiling whatever a hot pot is. I started to regret my choice. There were some side dishes like tteokbokki and some cooked noodles which were fine, but there was just a dearth of usable stuff to actually throw on the grill. That left the meat, which was delivered by a combo of our server and the gimmicky robot. Hipster Jr. did some pork belly (more on that later) that was kind of a fatty bacon like thing, and chewy to the point of being relatively inedible. I did beef brisket and beef bulgogi. Hipster Jr. Jr. did the bulgogi as well. They were fine. But are generally not high quality cuts of beef and just kind of curl and sizzle on the grill, sticking more than you’d hope and, again, being more of an activity than a hearty meal. I did manage to get a couple shrimp on there from the buffet, which were fine, but uneventful. Ultimately we all spent $37 each for at most $10 worth of food. Our bad, but also nobody seemed overly motivated to eat more. Oh, we also tried to do soft serve from their machine, which was not cold enough and was mostly a puddle of dairy.
Which leads back to that pork belly. The car ride home almost immediately turned to a bit of a panic as Hipster Jr. broke out in a sweat and started to get a bit of a racing heart and lots of me asking if I should pull over on the parkway for him to let it out. We did make it to our house — my car grateful for that — but he did manage to zero out that $37. I’m not saying he was poisoned, but he was the only one who ate the pork belly — and we made sure it was cooked — and was the only one who prayed to the porcelain god. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I swear that fucking robot was giving him the hairy eyeball.
450 Hackensack Ave. – Hackensack
201/488-0888
themoonkbbq.com
