Joo Mak

I love the food with a home cooked flavour. price is reasonable and service so fast. appreciate when we are hungry. will go back again and again.

Worth it! Been there for at least 20 times

This Korean place is rather packed for lunch and they have just added suction pipes on each table, implying they are quite good on bbq food? I haven’t tried.
However, their seafood pancake and sundulbu are good. Wholesomely, authentic kind of good. The portions are humongous. I saw the jajiangmian seems to be able to feed 4 women.
I had the ramen tolbuki which was just average & the tolbuki wasn’t chewy.

The girlfriend and I were in the area thinking of what to have for lunch when a brainwave hit — why not Korean food? Normally, that’d be an easy pick with the options available along Lorong Kilat, but then I remembered seeing Keiko’s review a couple weeks ago… and BAM. Decision made. We swung the car around into the back parking lot (now there’s a tip, especially since the front one only lets season parkers get in, and you look like a fool waiting for someone to get out — yes we were those people for a while).
Anyhow, entering Beauty World is like a massive blast from the past — we both had gone to school in the area, albeit at very different stages of our school lives, and it really doesn’t look like this place has changed one bit since then. In fact, I don’t think it’s changed since it was built in… the 70s? I may be exaggerating, but not by much, I assure you.
Back to the matter at hand, and this little Korean restaurant. So it’s on the fourth floor, and as we take the escalator up, I was looking around for it, and I discovered the hawker centre. I kid you not, a hawker centre, on the rooftop kind of level, and its old school. And I digress. We hunt for a bit, gawk at the hawker centre a little more, then we find Joo Mak, plastered with pictures of bulgogi and other tasty delights, which only made me want to go in even more.
We open the doors, and there’s a counter, and one other table of two Korean ladies chatting super animatedly. Good sign that they’re Korean, bad sign that it’s just one other table?
The owner-​type lady comes out from behind her counter, hands us some menus, and we flip excitedly, and pick out the seafood pancake, and the classic bibimbap, but of course we are distracted by the other four pages of beautiful, beautiful food.
Orders go in, and food comes out! Thank goodness there weren’t that many other people here, otherwise I might have passed out from a mixture of jealousy from looking over at the two ajunmas.
The lady brings out six appetisers, and they taste ZOMGAMAZING. Clean, simple flavours, and those crunchy pickles?! Woah. Next comes the hot stone bibimbap, with many a joyous crackle and pop, to which I quickly squeeze out that spicy sweet sauce and stir up that egg, and see it sizzle, and spoon some into my hungry face-​hole, and of course, burning my tongue. Worth it? YES MA’AM EVERYTIME MA’AM. Okay so I stopped for a little and let it cool down to I might at least enjoy the flavours, instead of scalding every tastebud I had.
That seafood pancake emerged, and it was more like a 12 inch pan pizza. HELLO. and it was DEEEEELIGHTFUL. Crisp and the bottom, without too much oil, and made even more amazing by that soy concoction the lady supplied… Wow. Just. Wow.
We washed it down with some rice punch, and for a fleeting moment, I was in K-​town para-​para-​paradise…
Meal’s done, and time to pay — to my very pleasant surprise, my wallet was as satisfied as our bellies and tastebuds were. We’d enjoyed great tasting Korean food, at a very reasonable price, and I’d gladly come back again with friends… just not too many, lest we get cross looks from the ajunmas whose seats we might have taken!

Two people guided us to this Korean restaurant when we complained about the lack of decent Korean restaurants in our neighborhood. We can’t thank them enough, because finally we have a reliable place to eat solid Korean cuisine.
We went a bit overboard and ordered 6 entrees for the 4 of us: bulgogi, spicy squid, black bean noodle, soondubu, kimchi pancake, and bibimbop. We were pleased with them, especially the beef bulgogi and spicy squid. We managed to finish everything, including the banchans (very good as well) and a bottle of soju.
The place is hidden on the upper floor next to the food court/​hawker center, but that’s okay — we don’t want the place to get too crowded! Service would be better if they could speak a little more English, but the ladies treated us well.
One flaw we found was the under-​powered air conditioning… Soju alone was making us sweat.
SUM: This will be our weekly lunch spot.