Top BBQ Grill & Pocha Cafe
In Buena Park, budget-friendly yet surprisingly high quality all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ and desserts
Once the pandemic forced Tustin’s AYCE Korean BBQ buffet Seoul Garden to close, nothing has fully replaced it – not even the replacements that subsequently occupied its space (SongHak and Burning X). While there are countless very good, higher-end KBBQ restaurants to choose from, Buena Park’s Top BBQ Grill & Pocha Cafe is as close to Seoul Garden’s more affordable yet high-quality formula we’ve found as of 2025, and certainly worth a visit for fans of endless meats and banchan.
Top Grill offers guests the choice of four AYCE menus: the basic $24 per person version with 15 beef, pork, chicken, and seafood items, a “premium” $29 version with 18 items (adding two plates of LA kalbi per person, boneless kalbi, and beef rib fingers), a “prime” $46 dinner (adding ribeye steak, unlimited better kalbi, beef tongue, and hot side dishes), and a late night “happy hour” menu with the nine most basic meats for $20. Once your table has selected one level, you get a QR code that allows your smartphone to order any of the items from your tier; servers with carts bring raw dishes out quickly, and swap out your table’s grill whenever it gets dirty or sticky from sauces.
Multiple buffets add AYCE access to everything from soups to japchae, various kimchi, naengmyun and bibim naengmyun noodles, fishcake, radish and rice wraps, and simple desserts (jello, pineapple). Soft serve vanilla, chocolate, and twist ice creams are also available, and like most of the other buffet items, very good. We absolutely loved being able to get up and select from so many dishes, including KBBQ rarities such as pumpkin soup and fried shrimp patties. Our sole complaint was that the bibim naengmyun – normally a favorite of ours – was slightly sour and aggressively sauced here, a very minor issue when one considers that these buckwheat noodles are virtually impossible to find anywhere around here as an AYCE offering, at any quality level.
Having experienced many shades of “not as good” inexpensive KBBQ over the years, we’re very attenuated to the difference between “cheap” and “good value” meat, and Top BBQ Grill is on the right side of that equation. Even at the $29 per person tier, the LA-style kalbi is delicious and substantial, the au natural steaks are largely ready for dipping, and the spicy pork bulgogi is heavily and properly sauced. While these aren’t the highest-quality meats we’ve found anywhere locally, they consistently taste really good with a high ratio of meat to fat, though pork belly dishes (including the yellow curry pork shown) are expectedly fattier. Importantly, and unlike some rivals in this inflationary economy, there’s no question that Top BBQ Grill’s guests can easily get the full value of their pricing tiers without needing to overload on food.
The only meat-specific issues we’d underscore are as minor as the buffet’s merely OK naengmyun. There are too few seafood choices here at every tier, so if you’re a fan of fish, octopus, imitation crab meat, or anything beyond one shrimp and one squid dish, you may be disappointed. And unlike restaurants with wagyu or woode prime marbled meats at their highest tier, Top BBQ’ Grill’s “prime” upgrades are hard to justify for a $17 per person premium.
Our advice is to go with the mid-priced menu and enjoy everything – the buffet items, the meats, and certainly the soft serve afterwards. This is a great mid-tier KBBQ spot, proving that it’s still possible to leave happy and full of Korean delights without breaking the bank.
Stats
Price: $$
Service: Buffet, Table
Open Since: 2021
Addresses
8948 Knott Ave.
Buena Park, CA 90620
714.820.6105
Instagram: @topgrill20