PERILLA Is What Happens When Korean BBQ Grows Up
West Loop's Bib Gourmand KBBQ spot is a love letter to immigrant resilience, served tableside
The name is the first thing to understand. Perilla is a plant known for its ability to grow in almost any soil, in almost any condition. Chef Andrew Lim and partner Thomas Oh named the restaurant after it deliberately, as a metaphor for their parents' journey as first-generation immigrants. That's not a marketing story. It's the foundation the whole place is built on, and you feel it from the moment you walk in.
The room is modern and beautiful, anchored by one of the most striking pieces of public art in any Chicago restaurant: a towering photorealistic mural of Michelle Obama painted by South Korean street artist Chris Chanyang Shim, known professionally as Royyal Dog. His work is known for depicting Black women dressed in traditional Korean hanbok, fusing cultural symbols to represent hope, resilience, and community. It's stunning in person, and it sets the tone for everything PERILLA is trying to say about shared tables and shared histories.
This isn't traditional KBBQ. It's an evolution of it. Lim and Oh kept what makes Korean barbecue irreplaceable — the tableside cooking, the communal family-style format, the ritual of it — and brought in American influences without losing the thread back to the original. The servers grease the grills with pork fat to get things going. You can cook yourself, but they'll come by to make sure everything is moving correctly and that no one is going hungry. It's attentive without being hovering.
The tasting menu is the easier call here. Ordering a la carte adds up fast if you want to try multiple things, which you will. Beyond the grill, the shareable plates are worth your attention. The kimchi fried rice and soondubu, a soft tofu stew, are both exactly what you want them to be. If you didn't land a BBQ table, bar and patio seating comes with its own menu of bites, and the bulgogi, galbi, and bibimbap will make you wonder if you made the right call anyway.
PERILLA earned its Bib Gourmand and it's not hard to see why. The original West Loop location has grown into something bigger. The River North outpost is a larger, more formal steakhouse format that has gotten its own recognition. There's also a handroll speakeasy downstairs from the River North location, which is the kind of detail that tells you everything about how seriously this team takes the whole thing.
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