Chubby Cattle BBQ
A Las Vegas-based wagyu beef chain somehow makes AYCE BBQ even more luxe for Orange County
All-you-can-eat BBQ restaurants aren’t exactly rare in Orange County – particularly in Irvine and Garden Grove, where numerous and mostly samey Korean BBQ restaurants thrive – but until recently, there were few Japanese-style BBQs, and even fewer standouts on meat quality. Throughout 2025, Las Vegas-based Chubby Group singlehandedly rebalanced the equation by opening four Japanese-inspired beef restaurants across Irvine, Lake Forest, and Tustin: two locations of the underwhelming Wagyu Factory during summer, then the impressive shabu-shabu restaurant Mikiya in October, and finally Chubby Cattle BBQ in December. As Orange County’s first location of Chubby’s flagship AYCE wagyu concept, which impressed us in Los Angeles before coming here, Irvine’s Chubby Cattle offers even more high-end and expensive options than its predecessors.
Described by the chain as the first “3.0” evolution of the Chubby Cattle concept, the Diamond Jamboree location replaces the Japanese-American fusion restaurant Tokyo Table with a more playfully decorated, video game-inspired space: Arcade games, posters, and marquees feature Space Invaders, Super Mario, and Pokemon alongside manga-styled comic imagery. Rather than downgrading the menu to attract new visitors, Chubby went in the opposite direction. In addition to $3 price hikes for the silver ($58/person), gold ($78), and diamond ($88) AYCE tiers, a new $98 platinum tier introduces “stone axe full blood wagyu” tongue as a two-per-person “special meat” and offers unlimited access to multiple dry-aged beef cuts and A5-grade wagyus. Servers go out of their way to explain that this is the first Chubby with dry-aged meats, hoping that will entice guests to spend $20 to $40 over the basic silver tier without dry-aged, A5, or full blood wagyu options.
Most customers’ Chubby Cattle meals will include a mix of American, Australian, and Japanese wagyu cuts, as well as whatever sushi, cooked appetizers, beverages, and desserts you can consume before the strict 90-minute seating limit per group is up. Using a tableside touchscreen, guests can order up to 10 standard plates (plus additional one-off and special items) every 10 minutes after selecting a per-table meal tier. Even in the Irvine location’s earliest days, and continuing months later, the kitchen did a good job of keeping dishes flowing to our table. On our first visit, service well-intentioned but somewhat unnerving: Over the course of our meal, we received recited pitches to join the company’s paid membership club, install an app, and post positive Yelp reviews “including all the photos you took.” Our server also tried to take control of our grill and get involved in our photography, which (as full-price paying customers) we didn’t appreciate. But on our second visit, multi-teammate service was attentive without being intrusive, and one guest’s allergy was well-communicated to prevent any issues.
We’d characterize the food at Chubby Cattle as good rather than great for the prices. Silver tier guests have plenty of wagyu and non-wagyu BBQ options to choose from, here including six wagyu cuts (ribeye, two cuts of short rib, top blade, chuck eye, brisket, and finger rib), Spanish ibérico pork, A3 cubes, and beef tongue. Additional non-BBQ wagyu dishes include multiple carpaccio-style sashimi and sushi options, cooked wagyu nigiri, steamed dumplings, and fried items including tempura, tofu, takoyaki, karaage, and calamari.
Gold guests add single-plate access to one of six items ranging from dry-aged wagyu chuck eye to five highly marbled fat A5 wagyu meat cuts (short rib, top blade, skirt steak, flank steak, and ribeye) – limited to one order per person – plus four new seafood items: scallops, Argentina shrimp, tuna nigiri, and tuna handrolls. They also get to choose one of four special dishes (a handroll with wagyu, otoro tuna, uni, and caviar; a bowl of A5 wagyu tartare with potato chips and Asian pear matchsticks; two pieces of otoro tuna sushi; or a somewhat sloppy-looking wagyu uni caviar nigiri), unlimited A4 meats and fatty Margra lamb, plus seafood items including red Argentina shrimp, scallops on the shell, and squid. Appetizers include fairly plain lobster dumplings, doughy pan-fried scallion gyoza, and rice-filled steamed wagyu shumai.
Diamond adds dry-aged Australian meats and one special dish (a theatrically tableside-torched, mentaiko-topped uni ball) to the unlimited menu, as well as the ability to order two special dishes per person, while platinum includes the aforementioned wagyu tongue special and unlimited A5 meats. Seafood options notably don’t change from gold to platinum levels.
Across our two visits, we tried most of the gold and diamond tier items, and from a meat quality standpoint, pretty much everything was as expected – it’s hard and perhaps besides the point here to avoid rich and fatty items, though the dry-aged Australian beef provides an alternative at diamond and higher tiers. Granted, we’re not as excited by excessive quantities of ultra-fatty wagyu or similarly fatty ibérico and super fatty lamb as we used to be, particularly when marinades and DIY dipping sauces struggle to overcome their naturally fat-laden flavors. After 90 minutes here, you’ll be on your way to resembling the chain’s namesake animals yourself.
If you’re going to order a lot of meat, make sure to grab some sauces to change up the flavors throughout your meal; most of the grillable meats are delivered plain, but miso and soy are occasionally used as marinades. Chubby Cattle’s sauce bar offers Japanese, Korean, and other soy-based dipping sauces, a house sriracha chili sauce, as well as sesame and various powders, while hand-delivering sliced cucumbers, lettuce leaves, garlic, and chilis to each table to use in wraps. These sauces helped accent otherwise plain meats.
A fine way to experience Chubby Cattle would be to stick with the silver tier and enjoy wagyu nigiri along with basic cuts of meat and seafood. In addition to unlimited salmon, yellowtail, and tuna nigiri, you can get great-tasting salmon and yellowtail carpaccio, as well as eel, yellowtail, and salmon hand rolls. Self-service buffet tables offer every guest unlimited access to chilled spicy clams, wasabi octopus, wagyu in curry, onions, or minced versions, braised pork, wagyu burgers, corn cheese, cheese sweet potatoes, multiple grillable veggies/mushrooms, and fruits ranging from blueberries and strawberries to watermelon, melon, and pineapple slices. Desserts include matcha crepe cakes, egg tarts, two flavors of swiss rolls, and soft serve chocolate/vanilla ice creams, which like serve-yourself lemonades, milk teas, slushies, and Pepsi soda fountain drinks are all included in the AYCE price.
Some of these items give away the fact that Chubby Cattle is not actually a Japanese brand. Though Chubby Group operates multiple Japanese-style restaurants ranging from BBQ and shabu chains to curry, yakiniku, sushi, and rice bowl shops, it’s actually a U.S.-based company with Chinese owners. Even so, the difference between Chubby’s flavors and Westminster’s Shinobu Japanese BBQ isn’t as profound as one would expect, though Shinobu’s lower prices would give most people 15 to 30 reasons to drive to Westminster instead.
When we visited Chubby Cattle in Los Angeles, we noted that the heavy focus on wagyu means that guests are getting legitimately premium AYCE beef at legitimately premium prices. The Irvine location is at once more expensive on the low end and even pricer on the high end than its predecessors, catering to an area that went from zero Japanese BBQ options to three (including this, Wagyu Factory, and 7 Japanese BBQ – since closed) in only a year. Even so, it has certainly won a significant fan base in Orange County; three months after opening, people were waiting outside in the (rare) rain before the doors opened for lunch. We count ourselves among those fans, though returning will be a splurge rather than a frequent occurrence.
Stats
Price: $$$
Service: Table
Open Since: 2015 (Las Vegas), 2025 (OC)
Address
2710 Alton Pkwy. Suite 101
Irvine, CA 92606
Instagram: @chubbycattlebbq