GEN Korean BBQ's Bulgogi Reaches US Grocery Shelves as Its El Paso AYCE House Anchors a Texas Sprint

GEN Korean BBQ’s Bulgogi Lands on Northgate and Times Supermarket Shelves

On July 15, 2026, GEN Restaurant Group announced an initial purchase order that puts four of its signature marinated meats — Beef Bulgogi, Pork Bulgogi, Beef Short Rib, and Chicken Bulgogi — into grocery cases well outside its restaurant footprint: 44 Northgate González Market stores across Southern California and 24 Times Supermarkets locations in Hawai’i, a combined 68 grocery doors.

For a chain built around tabletop AYCE grilling, that’s a real pivot. The same bulgogi a diner grills at the table in El Paso or Los Angeles is now sold ready-to-cook, sitting in the meat case next to the chicken thighs and ground beef — no reservation, no per-person AYCE price, just a package to take home.

Korea context: this isn’t a new idea so much as an import of an old one. In Korean grocery chains — E-Mart, Lotte Mart, Homeplus — pre-marinated, vacuum-sealed bulgogi and galbi have been a normal meat-aisle staple for decades, the default way many households cook Korean BBQ on a weeknight rather than going out for it. Bulgogi in particular is the everyday, home-cooking cut in Korea; galbi (short rib) is the one you’re more likely to order at a restaurant for an occasion. GEN’s SKU picks track that same split. The grocery push effectively recreates a decades-old Korean home-cooking category for a US shopper who has likely never seen it on a shelf before, landing it first at Korean-American grocers that already stock the rest of a Korean pantry.

For a Northgate or Times shopper, that’s the practical read: this is less a restaurant-brand novelty than a familiar grocery-aisle category — ready-to-cook Korean BBQ meat — showing up in a US supermarket chain for close to the first time at this scale.

How the UNFI Distribution Deal Powers the Grocery Push

The Northgate and Times placements didn’t happen on their own. They reached shelves through an initial purchase order under a distribution agreement GEN Restaurant Group signed with United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI) on June 10, 2026 — a deal that gives GEN access to UNFI’s wholesale network, which serves more than 30,000 customer locations across North America.

UNFI is the wholesale plumbing behind a large share of US natural and specialty grocery — it’s the distributor that gets a packaged product from a producer’s warehouse onto a specific regional chain’s shelves without that chain having to strike a one-off deal with every supplier. For a restaurant operator like GEN, signing with UNFI is the unglamorous but necessary step that turns “we’d like to sell bulgogi at supermarkets” into an actual truck route. The Northgate and Times rollout is the first visible result of that agreement, not a standalone retail experiment — and it reads as a template GEN could repeat with other regional grocers on the same UNFI network rather than a one-time deal.

Inside the El Paso GEN Korean BBQ House

The restaurant side of GEN’s business is still the core of the brand, and El Paso is its newest Texas outpost, at 1319-I George Dieter Dr, El Paso, TX 79936. GEN frames El Paso — sitting at the convergence of Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico — as a strategically chosen market, reaching a broader cross-border community than its other Texas restaurants. That’s the company’s own framing rather than an independently verified claim, but the geography backs it up: El Paso sits closer to Ciudad Juárez and southern New Mexico than to any other major Texas metro, a genuinely different draw radius than GEN’s Austin, Dallas, or Houston-area locations.

Korea context: the white, modern-facade look with bright signage that GEN and peer chains use for US storefronts is a fairly direct lift from how Korean BBQ houses actually present themselves in Korea — clean, brightly lit exteriors built to be visible from a strip of competing restaurants, not the dim, lantern-lit stereotype US diners sometimes expect. Once inside, the format tracks Korean convention too: a grill embedded in the middle of the table, ordering meat by the cut, and a steady rotation of banchan. One real difference is the grill itself — many BBQ houses in Korea still cook over live charcoal for a smokier result, while US chain build-outs like GEN’s lean on gas or electric grates, a trade of some flavor for consistency and cleanup speed across dozens of locations. And the banchan refills that GEN and other AYCE chains market as part of the deal are, in Korea, just baseline hospitality — free, continuous, and offered no matter what you order, not a premium tied to an all-you-can-eat upgrade.

That cook-it-yourself format — guests grilling their own meat at the table — is the mechanic GEN positions as core to the concept, and it’s the same mechanic driving both the AYCE pricing below and the grocery products above: familiarity with grilling bulgogi at a restaurant table is presumably what makes a shopper willing to try grilling it at home.

AYCE Pricing and Hours at the El Paso Location

The El Paso restaurant posts hours of 11:00 AM–10:30 PM Sunday through Thursday and 11:00 AM–11:00 PM Friday and Saturday. Lunch AYCE (Monday–Thursday until 3 PM) runs $20.95, and dinner AYCE (after 3 PM, weekends, and holidays) runs $31.95. Both fall inside the company-wide range GEN Restaurant Group disclosed as of December 31, 2025 in its fiscal-year 2025 Form 10-K: $20.95–$20.99 for lunch AYCE and $29.99–$33.95 for dinner AYCE across its restaurants.

Delivery-platform and review-site listings — not an official GEN source, so treat this as a useful but unconfirmed estimate — describe the El Paso lunch AYCE tier as covering 34 menu items and dinner as 47 items, with a Premium AYCE upgrade of roughly $20 adding wagyu and short-rib cuts on top of the base tier. For a party deciding between lunch and dinner AYCE, the practical gap is about $11 per person for the wider dinner selection — worth knowing before a group commits to a time slot, especially since the switch from lunch to dinner pricing happens at 3 PM sharp, not at a server’s discretion.

GEN’s Rapid-Fire Texas Expansion in 2025

El Paso wasn’t an isolated opening — it capped a fast run of Texas growth. GEN opened its 6th Texas restaurant in San Antonio on January 31, 2025, its 12th Texas restaurant in Waco that July (the company’s 8th new restaurant of 2025 overall), and El Paso that August as its 13th Texas restaurant and 9th new restaurant of the year.

Analysis: going from a 6th to a 13th Texas restaurant in roughly seven months is an unusually tight cadence for a full-service, tabletop-grill concept, which typically needs more build-out time per unit than a fast-casual format. Texas alone now accounts for a meaningful share of GEN’s total footprint, and the pattern — San Antonio, then Waco, then El Paso — reads like a chain working outward from its larger Texas metros into smaller and border-adjacent markets rather than just stacking more locations inside Austin or Dallas.

From Two Korean Immigrants in LA to a Nasdaq-Listed Chain

GEN Restaurant Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: GENK) traces back to 2011, when two Korean immigrants founded it in Los Angeles. As of December 31, 2025, the company operated 57 company-owned restaurants across California, Arizona, Hawai’i, Nevada, Texas, New York, Oregon, North Carolina, Washington, New Jersey, Florida — and South Korea itself.

That last detail is easy to skip past, but it’s the throughline for everything above: a company that operates restaurants in Korea as well as across a dozen US states is now also selling packaged Korean BBQ meat in US supermarkets. The El Paso restaurant, the Waco and San Antonio openings before it, and the Northgate and Times grocery placements aren’t separate stories — they’re the same California-founded, Korea-connected company pushing on both the dine-in and take-home versions of the same format at once.