Charcoal Mine BBQ House in Parramatta claims to be the first all-you-can-eat buffet bbq restaurant in Australia. Whether that’s correct, their website is www.bbq.com.au, does suggest that they were on the barbeque scene relatively early in Australia.
It’s a rather spacious space compared to most other Korean BBQ restaurants at $29.00 per person for lunch and $39.00 per person for dinner on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Dinner prices on the other weekdays are comparable to the lunch prices ($29.00).
The buffet section, though, is small with ~1.5 m of space each for the selection of meats and vegetables.
The range of meats available includes scotch fillet (marinated and non-marinated), spicy pork belly, unsmoked bacon, marinated chicken and chicken wings, as well as all your tripe from the liver, kidney, intestines to giblets. As for seafood, there is marinated baby octopus, calamari and mussels.
Not ones for tripe – other than the absent ox tongue – we try a mix of meats and seafood.
Our favourite cut of meat was the scotch fillet marinated in soy sauce, garlic and sesame oil (the dark coloured meat in the previous photo), which cooked quickly to a flavourful tenderness, while the other cuts were rather bland and tough.
The mussels were tasty, much like the chicken wings, weren’t worth the lengthy time required to cook them, while the homemade sausage exploded pork and shallot innards from its casing and stuck to the stove on cooking. Despite that, though, we did find the baby octopus tasty with a pleasant heat, and between that, the calamari and the scotch fillet, we filled out tummies followed by some fresh fruit.
The selection here is small and without the complementary side dishes you often get at other Korean BBQ restaurants. We managed to eat until we were full, but this is not somewhere to which we’d likely return.
Charcoal Mine BBQ House is located at 454 Church St, North Parramatta NSW 2151