Flamin' Yum Brings Korean BBQ, Shabu-Shabu, and Robot Servers to Jackson, Tennessee

A Korean BBQ and Shabu House Opens in West Tennessee

Flamin’ Yum Korean BBQ & Shabu House opened to the public at noon on Friday, July 17, 2026, at 17 Colonnade Blvd in Jackson, Tennessee, according to WBBJ-TV and NewsTalk 101.5 WNWS. The restaurant puts two dining formats under one roof: tableside Korean barbecue grilling and Japanese-style shabu-shabu hot pot service.

For a market where Korean food has mostly meant the occasional bulgogi bowl at a strip-mall counter, a full tableside grill-and-hot-pot house is a bigger commitment — for the restaurant and for diners deciding how to spend an evening. It opened with more table service to figure out than a walk-up counter would. This piece covers what that actually looks like: the robot servers, how the two formats fit together, what changed week to week after opening, and where the restaurant sits inside The Columns III development.

Meet the Robot Servers

Robot servers roll food directly to tables at Flamin’ Yum, but the restaurant is clear about what they’re for. General manager Aaron Newton told WBBJ-TV the robots are “really just for show,” that they don’t take tips, and — as he put it — they’re “not taking nobody’s job.” NewsTalk 101.5 WNWS previewed the robots the day before opening, framing them as a novelty as much as a service tool.

Analysis: That “don’t take tips” line lands differently depending on which country you’re standing in. Service robots have been rolling through restaurants in South Korea for several years — chains there have deployed them for everything from ferrying banchan refills to running food out of the kitchen, part of a broader wave of service automation. But Korea doesn’t have a tipping culture to begin with; servers aren’t paid a sub-minimum wage topped up by gratuities, so a robot “not taking tips” isn’t displacing anyone’s income the way it would at a US restaurant that runs on tipped labor. Newton’s reassurance — that the robots assist rather than replace staff — is the same line American diners want to hear about any service robot, but it’s answering a labor-and-tipping question that doesn’t really exist in the Korean context the format comes from.

Tableside Korean BBQ Meets Japanese Shabu-Shabu

Flamin’ Yum’s core format pairs two things that don’t usually share a dining room in West Tennessee: tableside Korean barbecue, where raw meat is grilled at the table, and shabu-shabu, where thin-sliced meat and vegetables cook in a simmering pot of broth (WBBJ-TV; Talk-N West TN).

Analysis: In Korea, tableside grilling (gogigui) usually isn’t a diner-serve-yourself affair the way it can be at some Korean BBQ spots elsewhere in the US. At a lot of barbecue restaurants in Seoul, it’s the server — not the customer — who does the actual cutting, using kitchen scissors to snip short ribs or belly into bite-size pieces once they’ve browned, timing it so the meat doesn’t overcook while the table keeps talking. The grills themselves are usually built directly into the table rather than set on top of it. Whether Flamin’ Yum’s tableside service follows that staff-does-the-cutting model or leaves diners to grill their own plate isn’t something the opening coverage specifies — it’s worth asking about on a first visit rather than assuming either way.

Shabu-shabu is the other half of the format, and it’s worth being clear that it isn’t a Korean dish to begin with — it originated in Japan, built around a pot of broth kept simmering at the table while diners cook ingredients in stages, usually meat and vegetables first, then noodles or rice folded into the same broth to finish the meal.

Analysis: Korean-owned restaurants — in Korea and across the US — have leaned into shabu-shabu (often branded syabu-syabu) as a menu item for years, treating it as compatible with home-grown Korean hot pot traditions like jeongol or the spicier, army-base-era budae-jjigae rather than as a foreign import that needs explaining. Pairing it with a Korean barbecue grill under one roof, the way Flamin’ Yum’s shabu house does, is a fairly standard combination at Korean-run restaurants — it isn’t a Japan-meets-Korea novelty so much as how a lot of Korean hot pot houses already operate.

Opening Day: Hours, Menu Rollout, and a Lucky Cat

Flamin’ Yum is open daily from noon to 9 p.m., per WBBJ-TV. Opening-day offerings included fresh-cut tiger shrimp, goat meat, and chicken prepared daily, along with a vegetable bar to go with the tableside grilling (WBBJ-TV).

That vegetable bar is a different setup than the free, endlessly refilled banchan spread that comes standard with a Korean BBQ table in Korea — small plates of kimchi, seasoned bean sprouts, pickled radish, and half a dozen other sides that show up unordered and get topped off without asking. Whether Flamin’ Yum’s vegetable bar works the same way, or is more of a build-your-own station, isn’t detailed in the opening coverage.

The rest of the menu rolled out on a schedule rather than all at once. Beer was available from opening day; hot pot soup service was set to start about a week later, and liquor about two weeks after opening (WBBJ-TV).

Analysis: That staggered rollout means the classic Korean BBQ pairing wasn’t fully available on day one. In Korea, grilled meat is traditionally paired with soju as much as beer, and the two often get mixed into somaek — part soju, part beer — ordered before the food itself. Licensing and staffing timelines are the more likely explanation for the delay than anything about the menu, but it does mean the somaek half of that pairing didn’t show up at Flamin’ Yum until roughly two weeks in.

The first 300 tables served on opening day received a promotional “lucky glass cat” piggy bank (WBBJ-TV) — worth noting that the beckoning-cat figure is originally a Japanese good-luck symbol (maneki-neko), not a Korean one, though it shows up often enough as restaurant decor across East Asian-run restaurants, Korean ones included, that its origin rarely gets a second thought.

Inside the Ming Shopping Center at The Columns III

Flamin’ Yum sits at 17 Colonnade Blvd, inside the Ming Shopping Center, as part of The Columns Phase III development in Jackson (Talk-N West TN; Gary A. Taylor Investment Company).

Pre-opening coverage described the Ming Shopping Center building as roughly 12,300 square feet (Talk-N West TN) — a figure that comes from local reporting during construction rather than a confirmed permit or developer filing, so it’s worth treating as an approximate sense of scale rather than a fixed number.

The Columns III is a retail development on the edge of Jackson, and a full-service Korean BBQ and shabu house landing there fits a pattern showing up in a lot of mid-size US metros over the past several years: Korean barbecue moving out of college towns and big coastal cities and into suburban shopping centers, often as one of the more distinctive tenants in a newer retail build. For West Tennessee diners, Flamin’ Yum is likely to be the first time trying tableside Korean grilling or shabu-shabu doesn’t require a drive to Memphis or Nashville.