Review: With Steak N’ Bone, Canton Gets its First All-You-Can-Eat Korean Barbecue Spot

The first time you walk into Steak N’ Bone, the well-appointed Korean barbecue restaurant housed in a Canton rowhouse, of all places, it might be because you’re desperate for a bubbling cauldron of kimchi-jjigae stew without having to drive to Station North or Catonsville or even Virginia.

The second time, you might do it right with an all-you-can-eat party, or perhaps a friends-and-family dinner, with all the grilled meats and banchan, chased down with some Korean beer and shots of soju.

The third time, maybe you’ll walk in again and order some to-go dishes or sit in the back dining room during the day, before the late-night folks arrive, just to have the outstanding crunchy seafood pancakes.

This isn’t the first restaurant to be operated out of this location, on the corner of Streeper and O’Donnell, just a block or so south of Café Dear Leon (and its permanent crab-bagel line), but it’s certainly the first Korean BBQ spot.

Open since September of 2024, the space has been beautifully updated, with wooden paneling and lots of windows that make it seem more like a lofty cabin than a barbecue joint. Don’t miss the huge kelly-green soju frog sitting on the bar guarding the impressive collection of liquor bottles, not just because it’s impressive, but because it reminds you to order soju—a distilled spirit made from rice, wheat, or barley and the national drink of Korea. (More on that later.)

Steak N’ Bone is owned and operated by Young Lee—who’s also involved with the hugely popular Bonchon Korean Fried Chicken and who is Korean-Argentine, which means he understands steak better than you do—with the considerable help of his nephew Kevin Lee, who’s also the manager and often your server.

“My parents are into it as well,” says Kevin of his uncle’s restaurant one evening, as he expertly scissors sizzling pork belly, brisket, and bone-in short ribs under one of the vertically moveable vents that make the restaurant look less like a KBBQ joint than a Quentin Tarantino set.

“It’s a small family business,” he says, while he migrates the meat off the fire and adds whole garlic cloves and jalapeños to the grill. Meanwhile, the small dishes of banchan are replenished and joined by bowls of rice, some pretty wonderful cheesy corn, more bubbling kimchi-jjigae, a bowl of lettuce leaves like a farmer’s bouquet with which to make ad hoc wraps, and that seafood pancake, a crispy, crunchy, blissful disk of seafood and greenery that comes topped with a bowl of dipping sauce.

If you ask nicely, Kevin will swing by and cut up your bits of sizzled steak and maybe work more magic—squeezing lemon on them and dusting them with Maldon salt.

When not busy doing other owner-related things, Young can often be found upstairs pretending to be Sweeney Todd—thinly slicing cuts of meat on a massive machine, or sourcing the steaks themselves, which come from local farms and are dry-aged for 28 or more days. It is those steaks, of course, that determined both the restaurant’s name and the fact that you will, if you get the bone-in option, end up with an actual bone smoking on your table’s hubcap-sized grill.

That smoke is pretty fun itself, and creates its own weather systems in the dining rooms—there are a few of them, both in the main street-level and upstairs. (There is also, amazingly, an actual dumbwaiter in the kitchen.)

There are more things on the menu that should be eaten, including yukhoe, which is the Korean iteration of steak tartare, an egg soufflé, and a terrific rendition of bulgogi. And there are things to order from the bar, which is well-stocked, as Young was once, conveniently, a liquor distributor. Which brings us back to soju.

We highly suggest ordering a bottle, even if you don’t drink much, because maybe either Young or Kevin or someone else might do this marvelous trick, in which they swirl the bottle around until an actual funnel forms inside, like a tiny tornado.

It’s a fitting conclusion to a marvelous meal—a bit of showmanship not unlike having your server bestow a martini sidecar or a perfectly pulled espresso—and yet another reason to rejoice in the fact that you don’t have to drive home from Ellicott City for your KBBQ fix.

STEAK N’ BONE: 2821 O’Donnell St., 443-401-2288. HOURS: Sun. Thurs. 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m. PRICES: Appetizers: $10; mains: $13-25; a la carte: $15-42; AYCE: varies. AMBIANCE: Woodsy Canton corner rowhouse and serious bar.