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Hungry City

The Thrill of the Tabletop Grill at Tong Sam Gyup Goo Yi

Tong Sam Gyup Goo Yi

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Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
Tong Sam Gyup Goo Yi
Korean
$$$
162-23 Depot Road, Flushing
718-359-4583

The crowd is of one mind at Tong Sam Gyup Goo Yi: From every table rises a gleaming black cast-iron dome with a tapered handle, like the lid of a giant pot, and on every dome lie stripes of pork belly, more white than red, flesh nearly overrun by fat.

The grills are turned high. The room starts to hiss.

In Korean, pork belly is called samgyupsal, or three-layer flesh, a name at once poetic and literal. It isn’t the only meat on the menu at this barbecue restaurant in Flushing, Queens, but I never saw diners order any other.

James Jung, a native of Chuncheon in the mountains east of Seoul, South Korea, and his wife, Whajung Lee, who grew up in Seoul, opened Tong Sam Gyup Goo Yi in 2002. The restaurant stands just off Northern Boulevard in the Murray Hill section of Flushing, part of what my colleague Pete Wells calls “the Queens kimchi belt.” (Two-thirds of the city’s Korean population lives in the borough.)

It’s a mile and a half from the nearest subway but right across the street from the Long Island Rail Road Broadway stop, a 24-minute ride from Penn Station. Cartoon pigs grin in the windows, each wearing a chef’s hat and red apron and offering a thumb’s up.

Pork belly — Yorkshire pork or lusher, slightly more expensive Kurobuta — is marinated for three days in doenjang, fermented soybean paste, and other ingredients that Mr. Jung hesitated to reveal. Whatever they are, they know their place and work simply to deepen the natural sweetness of the pork without eclipsing it.

The convex shape of the sottukung, or grill plate, on each table is meant to mimic the lid of a gammasot, or caldron, which in traditional Korean kitchens was installed above a wood-burning stove that doubled as a fireplace. Its curves allow for a steady blossoming of heat and, most crucially, for drippings to run down into the wreath of bean sprouts, kimchi and garlic cloves snapping on the hot iron below.

But this all sounds so academic, when the experience is anything but: the pork belly stretched out, the faintest ripple as it starts to feel the heat, the red darkening, the vigil that feels forever, although it takes less than 10 minutes.

The waitress (who is of Mexican descent, as are some of the cooks; Mr. Jung and Ms. Lee speak Spanish alongside Korean and English) keeps checking on it, tinkering with the heat. (This is where the artistry comes in.) When it’s nearly done, she snips the meat with giant scissors and presses it hard to the iron so it crackles and spits.

There are romaine leaves for folding around the pork, along with a swab of ssam jang, a meld of doenjang and gochujang (fermented chile paste), and strands of pickled daikon or scallion kimchi. Tuck in a garlic clove off the grill, and it’s almost too hot to hold.

I was just as happy eating the meat unswaddled, touched by nothing but sesame oil, which the waitress had squeezed into a little dish holding a few black peppercorns and a spoon-tip of salt.

I was also happy to buck peer pressure and try other meats, like thick chops of pork neck with just enough fat to keep them juicy, and thin panels of beef that shrank down to lovely musky ribbons. But duck proved dry, and octopus became bogged down in a gummy, oversweet sauce.

Pork skin arrived not fried, like chicharrones, but in chewy tabs whose frank scent and flavor evoked intestines. Eating it is reportedly a Korean beauty secret.

Other barbecue spots may have more and better banchan (side dishes) and less utilitarian décor. But Tong Sam Gyup Goo Yi has perhaps the best finish to a meal: first, a bowl made of ice, filled with naengmyun, buckwheat noodles in a bracing broth of beef bones, Korean pear, apple and radish that wipes the palate of all memory of what came before.

Then comes the glory of bibimbap, rice inflamed with gochujang, thrown onto the grill and stirred up with scraps of seaweed and the remains of meat. Be patient: It takes awhile for the crust to set under the rice, and that is what you want.

When one diner couldn’t wait and reached out her chopsticks, Mr. Jung shook his head.

“Like a kid,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: On a Hot Iron, Sizzling Magic. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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