Our server dropped these meats on the grate, then turned the heat up high and left us to our own devices, as he attended to other diners in this sprawling Korean barbecue operation attached to the Westfield Wheaton mall. Normally, I’d prefer to be left alone at a KBBQ joint, where I can experience the thrill of cooking and snarfing my own endless parade of meats. But I have to admit, I have not sat around a Korean grill since before the pandemic, worried that the communal nature of the concept would expose me to another bout of covid. So I’m out of practice. I’m also, quite honestly, concerned about those thin-cut rib-eyes sizzling over high heat. I can’t find a way to moderate the temperature. I’m afraid they’re going to incinerate right before my eyes.

I needn’t have worried. There is an essential mindfulness to Korean barbecue. The very act of watching over the grill — tongs in hand, your mind laser-focused on the meats — serves as a hedge against calamity. Observation jump-starts your instincts, which remind you to leave those meats alone. Let heat and time do their thing. Let the beef and pork render out until they shrink into these tender morsels encrusted with char, ready perhaps to be scissored right on the grill and dunked in sauce.

Within 15 minutes of taking my seat at Jongro, I realize how much I’ve missed Korean barbecue: a restaurant experience that doubles as a backyard cookout, minus the shopping, prep, cleanup and shooing away friends who just won’t leave. The funny thing is, I’m apparently the only person in Washington who refused to savor KBBQ during the pandemic, even when these places had plastic utensils on the table and plastic dividers between the grills and every diner had to cook their own proteins, no matter their skill level.

“Even during the pandemic, people love Korean barbecue,” Tommy Han, general manager at Jongro, tells me.

Han would know. Before he joined Jongro, he worked at the Iron Age Korean Steakhouse in Centreville, Va. Han says he had a waiting list even during the height of covid when everyone had to travel (and dine) in pods.

Like Iron Age, Jongro is a chain, though one with a smaller footprint, at least in America. Jongro is an import from South Korea, where they love their franchise restaurants, all 167,455 of them. Numerous Korean chains have already gained a foothold in the States — BonChon, Paris Baguette and Choong Man leap to mind — sometimes backed by the government or huge Korean conglomerates called chaebol. Group KFF — the acronym stands for Korean Fine Foods — is responsible for introducing Jongro to the United States with a KBBQ outlet in the heart of Koreatown in Manhattan. The Wheaton restaurant, the first outside New York City, is owned by a different group, Orah, which has the rights to the Jongro brand in the greater D.C. area. It already has a second location planned for Annapolis, expected to debut in late May.

The Wheaton location is designed to recall the Jongro (often spelled Jongno) District in Seoul, a cultural and historical jewel that serves as the chain’s inspiration. Actually, the restaurant is more like a time capsule of the district, circa the 1970s. Architectural details — tiled roofs, wood beams, lattice-frame windows — echo features of traditional hanok houses. Old-school horn speakers are affixed to poles near the bar, evoking a period when public announcements were blasted throughout the district. Even the servers’ outfits are period pieces, designed to mimic Korean school uniforms of the era. Enclosed glass cases in the dining room display vintage electronics, magazines and vinyl records — Korean cultural artifacts from a time long before K-pop dominated the market. Koreans of a certain vintage, Han tells me, feel immediately at home here.

Oddly, I feel comfortable here, too. Maybe it’s because two of my favorite things on Earth — vinyl and grilled meats — are together under one roof. But I’ve always been an admirer of Korean hospitality, too: Before you even plop down on a bench at Jongro, your table is set. Shallow metal bowls form a semicircle next to the grill; inside each are bites of pickled radish paper, cabbage kimchi, seasoned mung bean sprouts, cucumber and jalapeño pickles, and more. These are your banchan: complimentary side dishes, often fermented, that help cut the richness of the grilled meats, assuming you haven’t eaten all the snacks before your spicy beef bulgogi has cooked through.

There are two ways to dine at Jongro: a la carte or all you can eat. I’ve done both. The latter is the way to go. For $31 per person (the price has increased two bucks a head since Jongro opened last year, which gives you a sense of the inflationary pressures on meat-driven restaurants), you can gorge on an endless procession of proteins, like William Howard Taft in the era before “climate change” entered our vocabulary. Those practiced in the art of KBBQ will tell you to start with the unmarinated meats, which hit the grill without a lick of salt and pepper. Their reasoning is sound: If you launch right into the soy-garlic chicken or the spicy pork bulgogi, the naked meats that follow will pale by comparison, even if you dip them into one of the provided condiments: spicy chili sauce, kalbi sauce or a Korean-style yum-yum sauce. There’s another reason, of course, to follow this protocol: If you begin your meal with the garlic-soy pork bulgogi, you may never want to order any other cut. It is that good.

I appreciate Jongro’s efforts to widen the grilling options, even if I’m not ready to return to the kitchen’s butter chicken or Louisiana Cajun chicken anytime soon. Jongro has invested a lot of time and money to transport diners back to a particular place, and I feel the urge to honor the concept with everything I order, whether spicy beef bulgogi or kimchi pancake or the spicy rice cakes known as tteokbokki. Everything just clicks into place, even in this place out of time.

11160 Veirs Mill Rd., Suite LLH15, in the back of Westfield Wheaton, 240-669-7344; jongrokbbq.com.

Hours: 11 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday; 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday.

Nearest Metro: Wheaton, with a short walk to the restaurant.

Prices: $5 to $45 for all items on the menu.