Last weekend I made my way to a new restaurant on my list called K-Bop Korean Kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida. My best friend and I continued our exploration of restaurants in the city with this Korean spot, a clear popular choice upon simply driving in to park and finding a line out the door.

We ordered at the counter and found a booth to wait for our food. We decided to order a few different things to get the best variety of dishes here. Of course, you can’t go to a trendy Korean spot without indulging in a Korean corn dog, and we both opted for different ones. I got the sweet gochujang corndog, while my friend got the Flaming Hot Cheetos corndog.  Filled to the brim with mozzarella cheese and doused in a flavorful sauce, my corndog was so satisfying to eat. The cheese pull was on another level.

We also split a bowl of japchae noodles, a type of glass noodle that, while tasty, paled in flavor compared to the corndogs and the last dish we ordered. That last dish was a basket of kimchi fries topped with cheese sauce, bulgogi and jalapeños.  The burst of different flavors in this one alone left us staring at each other and eating in silence, taken aback by just how surprisingly good this one was.

Of course, we couldn’t finish everything. It was just too much food. But the corndog vanished quickly enough, and most of the fries were gone by the end. We had hoped to enjoy some of the restaurant’s ice cream after, but their machine was down, so we might need to pop in another time for that.

K-Bop Korean Kitchen is relatively new, opening in 2022. Other highlight dishes here include kimchi ramen, a wide range of boba teas, potato corndog, ramen dog, spicy pork bop and more.

— Aoife O’Riordan, associate editor