The handsome guys who run the Belloco restaurant group (Jeju Izakaya, Professor Lee) have added a new, achingly cute pork restaurant to their portfolio, and, holy shit is it busy! It’s been less than a month, but Botong Sikdang (普通食堂, or “common canteen” in Chinese) is already drawing big crowds for its small restaurant, resulting in two-hour waits for its signature “lengsanrou”, or sliced black-hair pork belly cooked on a griddle at the table. (This is not open-fire Korean BBQ.) We joined the crowds near People’s Square last night to see how it is.

It’s… it’s… it’s… packed! The restaurant feels like a kind of hip winter cabin, with intensely warm yellow lighting and plain white tile walls. That’s the backdrop to the boys’ re-imagining of what they call a Korean grandmother and taxi-driver dish named 냉삼 (nengsam) in Korean or lengsanrou (冷三肉, they made this up). It’s a real simple dish: slices of pork belly, sliced thin (68rmb, 120 grams) or thick (88rmb, 160 grams), sprinkled with black pepper (no salt -- that's what the pollack powder is for), cooked on a griddle at the table, along with dried green beans, button mushrooms, and sliced leek, and then dipped into a sauce and eaten like that. Their sauces are a little more modern than grandma: a sweet sukiyaki-type-thing with raw egg; a deep red, sugary and spicy number kept hot on the griddle, made with chili, butter and water parsley; fresh wasabi; the ground North Korean pollack powder (instead of salt); and for the more adventurous, oysters in a Korean chili sauce. The staff cook the pork belly at your table. All of this — the immense popularity spawned by Jeju Izakaya, the troupe of Korean xiao xian rou who run the place, the super-homey atmosphere, and a price tag of about 125rmb per person — means they have enough leverage to impose some rules. Like, groups can not be more than four people; they only seat the table when everyone has arrived; every person has to order a minimum of one platter of pork (120 grams min.); and they don’t take reservations. The fabric menu, which is also achingly cute, is basically seven items, and two of them are sauces. Most notable is the Volcano Cheese Egg (48rmb), a monstrous, nightmare of a souffle that comes out in a stone pot bubbling and gurgling, covered in a mix of Cheddar cheese and sriracha, and dusted with seaweed powder. And the Grandma Spicy Tteokpoki (48rmb), which was the favorite of the night at my table, a log of fresh niangao from Ningbo, the capital of sticky rice cakes, steamed and then snipped with scissors into a mild chili/pumpkin sauce, along with its friend, the Busan fish cake. Excellent. Then you have little fanatical details here and there, like the unfermented kimchi that's part of the banchan, and the jars of cold omija-cha, made with dark red magnolia berries, served instead of water. Would I wait two hours for it? The only thing I wait more than 15 minutes for is a flight from Pudong airport, so no. But then I’m not really a millennial woman, which seems to be the target audience here, and the ones raving on Dianping about this being the best Korean BBQ they’ve ever had. Which, uh, yeah. It’s not even BBQ, in my definition. But still! Point taken. There’s a lot of people in this city who are willing to wait for the latest and greatest, and Botong Sikdang is building serious trend capital right now. If you can squeeze in early, like right when they open at 4.30pm, or late, just before last order at 10.30pm, go check out the pork canteen yourself. Botong Sikdang, 1/F, 660-686 Jiujiang Lu, near Guangxi Bei Lu. Click here for more details.