Flower Pig

I live walking distance from this restaurant. The food is very good, but unfortunately the service turns me off enough to find somewhere else to get ribs and cold noodles. Without fail the service here is slow, rude, and unprofessional. Food and good company are a few of the greatest pleasures in life and they manage to poop on it every time.

FOOD: Their salted ribs are definitely worth the hype! It’s so tender and flavorful! It goes perfect with the cold noodles (dong-​chi-​mi noodles) which in my opinion is just as good as gil-mok’s cold noodles.
SERVICE: I’m not sure why there are so many complaints. Maybe it was because we avoided peak hours? The ladies there were so nice and generous with the side dishes. I have a 2yr old and they always bring out soup, rice, and egg soufflé just for him at no charge (and I didnt even need to ask).

I’ve been sitting here for the longest time and they never gave me my water or anything. I had to shout out couple times to get their attention to get something. Seriously worst experience ever worst customer service as well. I do not recommend this Korean restaurant.

Went to visit my grandmother in law over the weekend and my aunt suggested this restaurant and we decided to give it a try.
We arrived and were asked to wait since our party had 8 people. Not a problem. We waited and they seated us quickly. +1
We were given our menus and we decided what we wanted … 10 minutes go by. No water. no waitress… nothing –1
We call the waitress and tell her were ready to order. she tells us shes going to come. 10 more minutes go by –1
We flagged down a waitress and she tells us that another waitress is taking care of our section. At this point the men in our family were getting mad. I think it took about 30 minutes for her to come and take our order. –1
She comes back with place settings but leaves it on the edge of the table and doesn’t distribute it. we don’t have any water or side dishes either –1
Food comes out after an additional 30 minutes –1
The ribs with salt are good +1
The tastes like … water. No flavor at all.
But at least the check came quickly. –_​– The food was ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ but the service was horrible. It wasn’t even that busy that day.

I don’t know why this place has gotten a bad wrap but my experience was anything but that. We arrived around 345 pm… Yes. Some of their workers were eating but… Service was on point. Food was excellent. And we left happy with full bellies. We ordered the the seafood pancake that was delish n their salted pork ribs that was equally matched.
Definitely will come back again and order the same!!!

Definitely come here if you like waiting 15 minutes for your menu after being seated, even when the restaurant is relatively empty. Definitely come here if you like being ignored by waitresses even after making eye contact and asking for a glass of water. Definitely come here if you like your noodles to be served 20 minutes after your ribs arrive.
Definitely come here if you don’t like to leave tip. Cuz that’s what I did.
The salt ribs tho…

Let me start off by saying that I’ve probably been to this place 30+ times (probably more) over the course of the last 5+ years.
We usually order the Gam Ja Tang, which I think translates to pork bone soup. Anyway, we typically call in our order ahead of time and then just pick it up and eat it at home. My brother and I really like it. If anything, I would recommend getting this dish if you come here.
Once in a while, my family will eat at the restaurant. I’ve never really had too bad of an experience. that is, until this past Saturday night. First of all, we ordered our usual Gam Ja Tang and it came out ridiculously fast. It made no sense because this dish usually takes a while. Anyway, my family members all took one bite and realized that IT HAD GONE BAD. They basically served us leftover rotten food. So my parents called over the waitress and politely told them the situation. The waitress wasn’t rude but what surprised me was that she took one of our spoons and then tasted it right in front of us… ugh. After she tasted it, she agreed that my parents were right and took it back to have them make us a new one. Fortunately, the second one was a lot better but the whole situation was quite weird and unpleasant.
We also had the salted pork ribs, which I wasn’t a fan of but my parents seemed to like.
Lastly, we ordered cold noodles. I’ve had this dish here a lot. My parents say it’s good but I don’t think it’s anything special. Not bad but I’ve definitely had better.

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ESSENTIAL TIPS & EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
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# It’s located in the same business plaza as Polly’s Pies
# Flower Pig is known for their grilled baby back (pork) ribs and their cold noodles. In my opinion, cold noodles are average so don’t see what the big deal is. The pork ribs though yes. Much tasty. Many umami. Wow. But be sure to get the «plain» salt baby back ribs though not the spicy or soy flavors. The salt ribs are great on their own. No need to tarnish the taste with other condiments.
# It’s all about the salt baby back ribs. I already said that right? That’s because it is though I suspect they use a tiny bit of MSG on the ribs to enhance the flavor. I’m not cool with that because how can you get more umami than just plain meat with salt on it? Seriously. But I’ll just overlook it because it wasn’t that much. It was enough where I could detect it after the meal.
# If you’re here with another person, just order one bowl of cold noodles and one order of salt ribs. Split the noodles because even one bowl is a lot. I would prefer the noodles to be thicker. They’re super thin.
# My biggest issue with this place is the service. Normally, service is secondary to taste in my reviews, but when it’s difficult for me to ask for more side dishes and the server doesn’t refill my water glass even once, that’s a big problem to me. I asked for a pitcher of water because I knew service would be like this, but she did not attempt to refill my glass once she brought the pitcher. The restaurant was not busy because it was at least an hour before the Korean dinner rush.
# Because the service is abnormally slow, ask for a pitcher of water and side dishes off the bat. Let’s not beat around the bush, Flower Pig, you’re a slow fuckin pig.
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MY EXPERIENCE:
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The salt ribs here are awesome, the cold noodles are alright, and the service just sucks. They don’t even try to give proper customer service. It’s one thing when the servers are busy, but they show the effort, but another when you can tell they’re apathetic.
Flower Pig has all of the Korean offerings necessary for it to become a strong Korean restaurant, but with sluggish service that slowly boils my blood to curdling bubbles and some average dishes, they can only hold 3 stars in my book. Food overall is 3.5 stars, the 0.5 star boost coming from the salt ribs. I would have rounded them to a 4 if service was decent.
The side dishes (banchan) took 10 minutes to come out when typically they should land on your table within 1 minute of sitting down. Zero water fills were given to my family (party of 6) which is just crazy to me. One of my service litmus tests is to see how often a restaurant’s staff refills your water glass. 1 – 2 times is average while anything more is very good. And if your water glass never goes below half, that’s excellent service. It’s kind of obvious for me to say that I didn’t excellent service. Nor good or average service. Do you really want me to tell you what the other choice is on that scale? I just eliminated B, C, and D from the multiple choices (there’s no E). Could you guess how good the service was?
Also, the 2 orders of salt ribs I ordered came out 6 minutes apart from each other. It doesn’t sound like a long time, but it is. If you order 2 orders of the same dish, they should’ve been cooked on the grill at the same time. Not sure how they come out separately unless the staff gave the 2^nd dish that came out to another table since everyone orders at the same time. Maybe that’s their way of partially satisfying the tables in the restaurant by at least giving them one plate of ribs. Another theory is their grill can only cook 1 plate of ribs at a time. But hello. If this is your #1 selling dish, you would have upgraded to a bigger grill.
I would try to understand (but I don’t because come on you simply throw 2 orders on the grill), but the restaurant wasn’t even alive! My family came well before the dinner rush.
Another factor that keeps Flower Pig’s rating at a 3 is the price. At nearly $ 12 per bowl of noodles and $ 24 for the ribs, that’s definitely above average. Not awful to the point where I’d curse under my breath, but enough to look up from my bowl with noodles hanging from my mouth… wondering.

Really feel like I’m giving them too high of a rating than what they deserve, but since any post requires at least one star, here yall go.
**This is a review on their service, not their food:
1. Got seated in 45 minutes not because the wait was that long, but because we had to chase them down and stop them from skipping us to seat other parties when there was clearly a table that can seat us finished and about to leave.
2. No refills on our side dishes or water whatsoever. We probably asked about 3 – 4 times then stopped knowing we’ll never get it.
3. Food comes out 50 min after we order, all separately, pretty much one at a time. Nothing about our order was complicated because we all got the same thing. No apologies were mentioned.
4. Server placed the check on our table as soon as we get our food asking us to pay first because they need to close. Had the guts to come around 2 more times asking to pay.
That’s 4 strikes in one dining experience. Probably the worst anyone will ever have.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the food is great — a restaurant business isn’t just about the food. If the service and management is crap, it’s gonna reflect how the food will taste like no matter how delicious it was intended to be.
To be known to have terrible service is pretty embarrassing, but to not care, that’s shameful.
Please read these reviews that repeatedly comment on how terrible yall are and do something yall probably have never tried or bothered to: your job.

Although the food is tasty and quite good, the service at this restaurant is horrible. Unless you are a customer who is going to purchase a lot of alcohol, they do not ask if you need anything or lag your requests. A LOT. Greatly disappointed how they disregard customers whenever they want. The waitresses should seriously be retaught the value of customer service in order to have a well respected environment. They lagged our order for the longest time and our family dinner was ultimately put in a bad mood and eventually ruined.

Food was good but tbh. I was with my boss and my coworker and I didn’t like how we were being overlooked so that the old Korean men (aka bitter ass loud mouths who have no qualms about yelling) might be served faster.
Dead ass this waitress got my order wrong and she was just kept insisting that we were the ones at fault that I was just like «ok cool u pretty much ordered for me, huh»
So I took what she gave me, enjoyed my lunch and ended my lunch break

Save your $$ and go somewhere else. The service here is HORRIBLE!!! This is my 3^rd time going and I’m one who usually never complains but the level of service here is so bad i finally signed up for Unilocal just to complain. Please dont support this restaurant, they dont deserve to be in business…

Good food but tonight, they seated «VIP» guests before seating the 7 parties that were in the queue. Their excuse was «those are horrible seats though, would you want to sit there?»
Uhh Yea. I’m not here for the view.
Too many options in this area to continue coming here.

Here is famous for cold noodles and
salt pork baby back ribs.
Especially, pork back ribs are good and can not
be smelled stench.
You can see a lot of people who visited here after
golfing In weekend.
Cold noodle soup and mixed cold noodle are
very delicious.
However, services are very slow, so you have to
ask to bring menu, side dishes, refill of side
dishes and bring food as quickly as possible.
Foods are good but services are very slow.

Overall disappointed. Over priced, poor quality, lack of customer service. Only 5 tables were filled with customers at 1 pm but our waitress forgot our order. Typical old korean lady service. Oh did I also mention poor quality.

Their food taste is not too bad, but a little high priced. Their interior is clean but I’m not too crazy about their purple chairs. Their service is just alright. But their Dongchimi guksu has to be the best around, just a lil pricy.

Mediocre food at high prices and terrible service. When I arrived it was a full house and was put on a waiting list. The staff had no idea how to deal with the number of people there. This place is absolutely terrible and I will not be coming back. Here’s a list that turned into a novel if you’re willing to read.
1. THE WAIT: The girl who recorded names on the wait list and seated people was constantly calling out the wrong names causing confusion for many people. I over heard an old korean man saying he would never come back again because his name kept getting skipped. My party of 2 was called and then told us to wait again because they called the wrong party to be seated. As my party was called I watched the waitress mentioned before cross off my name. A few minutes later, when I was waiting and knew I was the next party to be called, I watched the same lady skip my name and call the next party of 3. I then told the lady that she skipped my name and she apologized and agreed but didn’t tell that to the party of 3 that was also called ending in more confusion. (If I wasn’t actively watching the ghetto waiting list, my party would’ve been skipped completely)
2. SEATING: When my party was finally seated we were seated in a nice booth with squishy seats. It was pretty roomy and pleasant. What wasn’t pleasant was the previous party’s booze and leftover food that had yet to be cleaned up. My mother and I constantly asked for our table to be cleaned up, and after about 5 minutes of asking different people to get out table cleaned, someone came to our table to ask how our dinner was. WTF. We told the waitress that the food on the table was not our own and would like to have it cleaned up. She told us that our table would be cleaned shortly and in the meantime we could order some food. Surprise surprise, we didn’t know what to order because we never received menus. We were then asked to stand so that they could finally clean up the table (which they did a bad job at). Could it get any worse? Yes it can.
3. FOOD: We finally got our menus and ordered food. Didn’t ask us for drinks but they assumed a water and some kind of hot drink would be good for my mother and I. We ordered 2 noodle dishes (nengmyun) that came out to be $ 25!!! With it we got 2 side dishes, a potato salad and pickled radish I believe. The nengmyun and side dishes were just okay, but we had to ask multiple times to different people to have the side dishes refilled once we finished them. Never got my water refilled though.
4. Slow. Everything was so damn slow. Got my check while I was finishing up but after putting money on the table and waiting a couple minutes I walked up to the cashier and hand them my money to speed things up and get out of there.
Save your money and don’t come here.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Beach Boulevard corridor that runs between Buena Park and La Mirada has basically transformed into a new KTown. LA? Garden Grove? Meet your new-​money Korean cousins who are transforming Buena Park and La Mirada into a Seoul-​ful place.
Flower Pig AKA Kote Dae Ji is an anchor in this bustling new ethnic enclave. You’ve got premium cuts of meat, copious amounts of soju, and plenty of ahjussis fresh from work/​golf to consume it all. But what do you order if you are a non-​Korean chingoo like me?
Something called «dongchimi gook soo».
Me: «Say that again? Chimichurri gook soo?»
Arnold K: «Dongchimi gook soo.»
Me: «Donburi gook soo?»
Arnold K: «Dongchimi gook soo.»
Me: «Doraemon gook soo?»
Arnold K: «DONGCHIMI GOOK SOO!!!»
However you pronounce it, that don’t-ya-mean-gook-soo is a refreshing dish for a hot 100+ degree Southern California Spring. It’s a cold, clear, briney kimchi-​flavored broth with some 7-​Up/​Sprite to keep the noodles al dente. The Gangster King of La Mirada, Arnold K., was on hand to show me how to live the ahjussi life and apparently that involves do-​re-​mi-​gook-​soo.
What else is good here? If you go with the meat, you gotta order the Combo A ($ 109.99) which gives you a sample of all the different cuts of meat, plus the largest seafood pancake I have ever seen and all of the delicious banchan you can eat. I’ve also heard their baby back ribs (which they cook for you in an oven) and their naengmyun (which is hand-​made) are delicious but I was STUFFED after sharing Combo A with 5 guys and finishing things off with dopamine-​gook-​soo.
Not all of the waitresses here speak English, so handling your order may take some diplomacy. If you’re lucky, either Lauren or Susan will be around… Two of the nicest and funniest Korean ladies in the business. Together, the two of them not only run Flower Pig/​Kote Dae Ji, but they probably run La Mirada-​Buena Park KTown as well! Make sure you ask them for other food recs and they’ll take care of you!
In short, ask for Lauren or Susan, order the Combo A for barbecue, and eat don’t-you-mean-gook-soo!

Came here last night for dinner with a group of 9. Called ahead and made reservations. They usually don’t take reservations on the weekends, but they were kind enough to take ours. Our table was ready for us when we got there.
We all got the salted ribs. They are a must try here. Tender and flavorful. Really good! Then everyone also got either a rice dish or noodle dish to eat with the meat. All the banchan dishes were pretty good. Authentic and tasty! I got the Dong-​Chi-​Mi Gook Soo (cold noodles), and it was decent. I still prefer Gil-Mok’s in LA, but it was pretty good. My husband also got Bul-​Go-​Gi, which was pretty good. Meat was tender and the flavor was spot on. My friend’s dol-​sot nak-​gee-​bokum (spicy octopus pan fried rice?) was really good! Great flavors!
I would’ve given them 5 stars, but their service was a bit off. The servers were actually really nice, but our food all came out one at a time. And it took awhile for the food to come out. And my noodles? I got them at the very end, when everyone was done with their meal. and only after one of my friends went up to the servers in the back and asked what happened. From the looks on their faces, they had forgotten my order. Hey, but it’s ok. Mistakes happen.
The ribs were good. I will be back. And I will make sure to get one of the Dol-​Sots and not the noodles.

Part of ordering is knowing what to order. One person’s 1 star is another’s 5 star simply by knowing what to order.
For instance, if you go to a restaurant that specializes in seafood and order a steak, likely the people who order seafood find their meal amazing while the steak eater discovers that the steak isn’t prepared quite right. Places have specialties and often offer other items simply to provide variety.
Just so that you know, I am okay skipping variety. I want the best item on the menu. Yep. Give it to me. Make sure that it’s the specialty of the house for me.
We got the korean pork ribs, no sauce, just salted and oh so tasty. I could make a meal of these. These were meaty, juicy, and seasoned just right.
We also got BBQ eel. I was surprised with the generous portion. At first, I thought it was half of a fish. Normally when I get eel, I get small pieces. Oh, no. This was flaky, tender, and tasty.
Did you know that Psy now has his name on soju glasses? Oh, yes. If you don’t believe me, then order soju with your meal. We did and Psy joined us for our meal. At least he drinks my preferred brand, Chamisul. Good taste, Psy.
No, we didn’t order any BBQ. While this place isn’t AYCE, we rarely eat AYCE anyhow. Again, we are looking for quality, not quantity. Read other reviews to determine the quality of the BBQ here. As for me, I’m sticking with the specialities. Next time, pork ribs, eel, and I’ll add in the much raved about glass noodles, too.