Eight Flavors, One Long Evening

by Yuna Kim · October 6, 2026

I stayed a long time at Palsaik. That is my method — stay longer than the meal requires, and the place starts telling you things. The Đông Du branch keeps a warm terracotta dining room under charcoal, tabletop grills humming low, gold-on-black Korean signage on the walls. It is premium but it is not stiff. Lively, in the way a good kitchen is lively.

The signature arrives on a deep-red lacquered tray: eight portions of pork, each in a different marinade, laid out on perilla leaves. Eight flavors. The menu is printed in three languages side by side — Vietnamese, English, Korean — with a gold PREMIUM QUALITY seal on the wordmark, and the Korean name 팔색삼겹살 right there next to the wagyu and the galbi. It made me a little homesick, in the good way, the way that means the food is honest.

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Eight marinades is not variety for its own sake. It is eight small invitations to slow down.

I asked our server which flavor the regulars choose. She didn't hesitate — pointed at the third from the left, smiled, and said her grandmother would have picked the same one. We talked for a while after that, about her family in Busan and mine in Sapa, about how perilla leaves taste like every Korean summer at once. This is why I stay: the families behind the counters, the stories folded into the walls like the leaves around the pork.

4.9 stars from 3,682 reviews, and the room earns it the slow way — not with spectacle but with the tray, the fire, the unhurried refills of banchan. I ate all eight flavors. The third from the left was, in fact, the best one.