Sumo Niku Unli Japanese BBQ Review – P549!

We’ve all become samgyupsal addicts in the last few years! A few weeks ago, I saw this new restaurant while doing errands at SM City Sta. Mesa.

I already had other plans for dinner at the time so I just told myself that we’d come back to try it soon. And then, on the next attempt, we were told that they had run out of some items, so we just went somewhere else.

Now, finally, third time’s the charm! We made sure to go early, before the dinner rush, and a good thing we did, because the place started to fill up after we got our table and a long waiting queue formed outside.

The restaurant is Sumo Niku Unlimited Japanese Barbecue, and it is P549/person, and it is value for money!

Sumo Niku Unli Japanese BBQ

Technically, it’s not a samgyupsal place because it’s Japanese (TV was showing anime and music was J-pop), but for all intents and purposes we just treat it like a samgyupsal place.

It looks just like a samgyupsal place.

Here’s the menu:

To order, we had to fill out order slips:

The Food

The food choices are limited compared to other samgyup places. The choices of sides are kind of boring but good. Basic, but not bad.

We ordered our usual order at samgyupsal places – the thinly-sliced Wagyu beef, which is nice, although I didn’t really notice the Wagyu difference, but it’s meatier though (it has more meat than fat. Other samgyup places usually give very fatty strips of beef). We also tried the U.S. Marinated Beef – this is like a black pepper beef, but it is tender because they put in some meat tenderizer, which I could taste. Nevertheless, we kept reordering these 🙂 Unfortunately, they didn’t have the Angus Prime Short Rib available.

Kurobota Pork!

However, our favorite, to our surprise, was the Kurobota pork! We usually don’t like the pork at other samgyup places but this one was really good. It tasted meaty and porky (in the best way). This Kurobota pork is definitely the one we will be going back for (and the fruit salad).

The unli rice is Japanese rice!

We also ordered some Japanese fish cake and crab sticks to try, and I didn’t know what I was expecting, but it was just like some fish ball and some kani. We won’t be ordering these again next time. We will stick to the beef and especially the Kurobota pork next time 🙂

They gave us three sauces – one sweet soy-based sauce, one that’s like a doenjiang-based sauce, and a vinegar sauce.

Here’s the cheese:

Drinks – they only have Pepsi products. I think they offer 1.5L Pepsi for P99.

Other things I liked about Sumo Niku

Sumo Niku is nice and clean. Many of the samgyupsal places I’ve been to have greasy floors, worn out chairs and tables, and dark lighting, but Sumo Niku is clean and new and relatively bright.

I haven’t been out a lot since the pandemic, so this is the first time I’ve seen a samgyupsal place have some paper on the grill. But, we’ve never had to change the grill because we’ve never burned anything this time. The meat just become nice and golden and don’t get burnt black for some reason 😀

They also provide some ground black pepper and chili powder. They have free water.

I made a little Pepper Lunch-inspired rice bowl – I used the first sauce, some of the thin beef strips, some corn, rice and generous dashes of the ground black pepper 🙂

Of the side dishes, our favorite was the fruit salad 🙂 It’s a simple, creamy fruit salad with added mayo that made it taste like a hot salad 🙂

Service is cheeful, fast and efficient. Also, we weren’t forced to order anything we did not want to. We recently went back to one of our old favorite samgyupsal places at the Podium and were disappointed because they changed their policy – all customers need to order an “initial set” of chicken and pork items first, and then, AFTER you finish all of them, that’s the only time you can order something else (what we really wanted to order like beef). We were already full and couldn’t order much of what we actually wanted and I wasn’t happy I spent money on food I did not want to order.

Summary

At P549/person, Sumo Niku is definitely worth the money. The food is basic but some of items are surprisingly good – the Kurobota and the unli Japanese rice make it worth it for us.

I do miss the vegetables and banchans like spring onion salads, japchae, etc… The only green leafy vegetables available were kimchi and lettuce.

We will definitely be going back since it’s close to home and we usually do errands at SM Sta Mesa, anyway. Gas prices are CRAZY right now, at P80/liter, and I don’t want to be going anywhere far. When I started driving to work, gas was only P15/liter! Actually, after staying home for most of 2 years, even going to MoA now feels like super effort and just thinking about it is so nakakatamad na (I’ve been meaning to go to Ikea since it opened). I’m just not used to going far away anymore, LOL.

The past two years during lockdown, we’ve been doing DIY samgyupsal at home, and it takes time and effort to make several banchans, marinate meats, wash lettuce, etc… Right now I’m thinking we can just go to Sumo Niku whenever we have a craving because it’s so much easier and we don’t have to clean up afterwards 😀

Overall, we were happy with the food, cleanliness, and value for money at Sumo Niku.

Sumo Niku

Ground Floor, SM City Sta. Mesa

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sumoniku/