Korean BBQ's 2026 US Expansion: Inside Seoul Jung, KPOT, and GEN's Growth

Seoul Jung Korean BBQ in Dublin, California

Seoul Jung Korean BBQ runs an all-you-can-eat, grill-at-the-table restaurant at 3762 Fallon Rd in Dublin, California, in the East Bay suburbs outside Oakland. Like most AYCE Korean BBQ concepts in the US, the menu is tiered rather than flat-priced: the restaurant’s own ordering site lists a Classic tier starting at $24.99 per adult, a Premium tier from $32.99 that adds LA Kalbi and marinated short ribs, and a Wagyu tier at $38.99 per adult.

Korea context (analysis): That ‘LA Kalbi’ name on the Premium tier is a small giveaway of how far the format has traveled from its roots. It isn’t a dish from Korea itself — it’s a butchering technique that Korean immigrant butchers in Los Angeles popularized, cross-cutting short ribs across the bone into thin, flanken-style strips instead of carving the single thick slab, so galbi, that’s still the standard cut at barbecue houses in Seoul. Order ‘LA Kalbi’ at a restaurant in Korea and you’d likely get a confused look; it’s a diaspora invention that AYCE chains like Seoul Jung have folded back into the mainstream US Korean BBQ vocabulary as a mid-tier upsell.

KPOT Opens a New Fort Worth Location

KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot opened a new location at 2600 N. Tarrant Parkway in Fort Worth, Texas, on April 27, 2026, according to the chain’s own location page and a Community Impact report on the opening.

Korea context (analysis): The ‘hot pot’ half of KPOT’s name points to another US-market hybridization. In Korea, tabletop grilling — what a Seoul local would just call a trip to the gogi-jip — and simmered hot-pot dishes like jeongol or budae-jjigae are typically two different kinds of restaurant trips, not combined at the same table with individual mini pots bubbling next to the grill the way KPOT and its direct competitors do. The all-in-one grill-plus-pot format spreading through US strip malls and shopping centers like the one on Fort Worth’s North Tarrant Parkway is closer to a value-buffet invention built for choice and volume than a transplant of how either dish is actually eaten in Korea.

KPOT Soft-Launches in Alexandria, Virginia

KPOT also soft-launched a location in Alexandria, Virginia, at 6224A N. Kings Highway on June 4, 2026, with a full grand opening planned for later in the summer, according to the company’s site and local coverage from FFXnow and The Zebra. FFXnow described the concept’s pitch to the South Alex neighborhood as bringing a ‘cookout’ atmosphere indoors.

Opening in stages — soft launch first, grand opening later — gives a new location time to work out staffing and kitchen timing on a real crowd before the marketing push arrives, which is presumably why Alexandria’s rollout looks different on paper from Fort Worth’s single-date opening even though both are the same chain running the same format.

GEN Korean BBQ’s Mixed Q1 2026 Results

Not every part of the Korean BBQ growth story is a straight line up. GEN Restaurant Group, a publicly traded operator, reported an 8.8% decline in same-store sales for the first quarter of 2026 — an improvement from the 11.7% decline it posted in the fourth quarter of 2025, but a decline nonetheless — according to its SEC 8-K filing and StockTitan’s coverage of the results. The company said it slowed its 2026 development plans to five to seven new restaurant openings and suspended construction on six additional locations, citing what it called disciplined capital allocation.

Korea context (analysis): GEN’s structure — a company listed on Nasdaq, filing quarterly results with the SEC, managing a national real-estate and construction pipeline — has essentially no equivalent inside Korea’s own Korean barbecue industry, which is still overwhelmingly made up of independently owned, single-location restaurants rather than public chains. The all-you-can-eat format itself is a minor niche inside Korea, where most barbecue houses price a la carte by the cut or by weight rather than per person; the version most American diners picture when they hear ‘Korean BBQ’ is, in large part, a US business model built around a Korean cooking method rather than an import of how the format is typically run back in Korea.

Why Korean BBQ Keeps Expanding in the US

Fox News has reported that Korean BBQ is booming across the country even as Tex-Mex chains close locations nationwide, with industry observers pointing to the interactive, grill-it-yourself format as part of what draws younger American diners in — a format where the cooking is part of the entertainment, not just the meal.

Analysis: Line up Seoul Jung, KPOT, and GEN and a pattern comes into focus that’s more about American restaurant economics than about Korean food itself. Tiered AYCE pricing is easy to put on a sign and easy for a table of four to split without an argument. A hot pot bolted onto the grill adds a second course of perceived variety without a second kitchen line. And even the chain that’s pulling back construction, GEN, is still opening five to seven new locations a year, just more carefully. That’s a distinctly American commercial adaptation of tableside grilling — in Korea, the same grill is mostly just dinner, priced by the cut, not a genre competing head-to-head with Tex-Mex for a value-conscious night out.