What might Korean BBQ look like if cut loose in Portland? Jeju has some answers. Ceremonial yet loose. A place that will give you meat sweats and poetic nuance. Wood-fired cooking at center stage (no tableside grills here). Add in dry-aging methods and in-house, whole-animal butchery. Karaoke culture is embraced. Did we mention a fog machine?

Chaos theory is a given. Which is to say: Peter Cho and Sun Young Park are in the house. The free-thinking masterminds behind Portland’s iconic Han Oak and Toki have launched Jeju (626 SE Main St), their most ambitious project, a fresh vision of Korean barbecue in four courses ($75). Limited a la carte can be had at the bamboo bar, where chic cocktails and obscure Korean spirits are poured by engaged bartenders. Bring your roommates ... or your parents.

Call it the grown-up Han Oak, a food rave with a driver’s license. The house philosophy is “This is who we are, this is how we eat. Join us.” 

Adjust your dials to happy gear. Hanging origami lights glow in every polychromatic shade of Barbie pink. South Korean rapper Zico bounces overhead, sending necks straight into bobblehead mode. And everyone, staff to diners, feels part of the family. Their house, your house. 

Cho, all blue-apron and thousand-watt smile, bustles through the room, clutching a bottle with a motion-detecting sensor on top. Raise your glass at the table and Jinro soju shoots out of a plastic toad on top. Miss the sensor and your hand gets soaked. That’s part of the ritual. No one is having a better time than Cho. He might even pull up a chair.

Over at the bar, the house negroni infuses Campari and vermouth with nostalgic Korean kids’ snacks Jolly Pong and Banana Kick, then lays a pencil-thin, chocolate-dipped Pepero cookie across the rim. It tastes like freedom.

Most restaurants are lucky to get two or three things right: Love the food, hate the room. Great cocktails, rude service. It took a few months, but Jeju delivers it all. 

At most Korean places, meals are like James Brown’s “Night Train,” all funk and sweat. Jeju tends to be more Korea Unplugged—quiet edges, refined modesty, emotional generosity.

Pescatarians and vegetarians can get their own playlist. But Jeju’s raison d’être is wood-fired, whole-animal Korean barbecue, the couple’s longtime dream and a work-in-progress since Han Oak’s early backyard-barbecue experiments in 2016. The approach is unusual by any measure—locally sourced meat, house-butchered, finished over live fire, and delivered with excitement.

The idea taps back to Cho’s training at New York’s Michelin-starred Spotted Pig, the gastropub that put nose-to-tail madness on the map. Cho could barely handle a kitchen knife when he auditioned in 2005, while working at Whole Foods. But he quickly rose from fry bitch to right-hand man, serving the likes of Jay-Z and Bono. Soon after, he led the kitchen at the Breslin, a buzzy, meat-centric restaurant, before he and Park headed to Portland in 2014.

Now, he just serves the likes of us. And who better to appreciate this than Portland? Take it from my friend Drew, two bites into Jeju’s hot dog: “Oh my god. Guys. This is fucking delicious, people.” I doubt Jay-Z ever said that.

First up is a laid-back hello: seasonal banchan including Cho’s “mom’s kimchi,” the menu’s only immutable fixture, and perhaps an “egg drop egg” swirled into a pot of hot anchovy broth until the wisps rise to the top, to be gathered in a fluffy mouthful. It’s like biting into a scrambled egg cloud, punchy broth below, briny salmon roe on top.

The second course gets your attention. Mandu dumplings, a Han Oak cult item, arrive six per order under a lacy force field of crackle-crust that shatters like crème brûlée. A jet-black pool of Cho’s “bone broth supreme and black vinegar” hides below. It’s the missing link between a soup dumpling and a cold remedy. Then comes a modern take on old-school naengmyun, a chilled noodle soup in a big metal bowl. To eat it, pluck together some soft-crisp noodles and velvety dry-aged kanpachi slices between sips of cold white kimchi broth. Surging on top: sweet-hot yuja chojang and chive oil dots floating about like amoeba cells. Nice.

Course three is a meat rampage. Buckle up. Korean barbecue prizes beef in every iteration, from richly marbled to wonderfully chewy, off cuts to primal pieces, cartilage and all. Jeju samples the range in four nightly butcher cuts, their edges blazing with live-fire char. Take it all down the Korean way, as ssam, bundled in the parade of table lettuces, herbs, large radish discs, shredded allium salad, and spicy ssam-jang dipping sauce.

A few faves so far: the primo rib eye; what’s known as the “oyster of the beef,” a grunt-worthy nugget cut from the hip; and that custom-ground hot dog, with its great snap and smoky spice. Galbi is on the bone, every inch coated with luscious marinade, salty bits, and speckled grill char. I gnawed it without a shred of dignity. Pray you get to taste the barbecued house bacon, thick-cut and beautifully cured, with a tease of sweet smoke and ecstatic bark action.

Not everything soars. Pulled pork is lost in this company, and some cuts simply need more pow. Desserts can delight (chocolate bingsu and marshmallows) or overwhelm (too much décor on the Basque cheesecake). 

But mostly Jeju delivers. Barbecue like this takes patience to reduce raging flames into glowing embers, to stand vigil to the perfect quiet art of the char. Jeju’s crack kitchen crew does it nightly. 

Just don’t call this a serious restaurant. To Cho and Park, the very idea would be a kind of death. Which is why Cho went searching for a fog machine recently. Three months after opening, karaoke has arrived at Jeju, Han Oak–style, neither advertised nor a given. It’s a read-the-room situation; when it works, the place erupts into a house of song and laughter. 

You never know who might be in the room. One recent night, the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and his wife, artist Carson Ellis, got up from their table and belted out the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.” The formality of dining out sheds instantly into stupid fun. This is the secret to a Cho-Park joint.

Interest is gauged as the last plates are served. Anyone in? If so, game on. A screen drops, disco lights go on, mics come out, and fog vapors creep through the air. In an instant, Jeju becomes a karaoke bar. At first, Park worried about putting the action in the dining room. Now, she says, “I think we need two fog machines.”