Dae-Ji Cutlet House

Stopped here for an early dinner before VSO. surprised it was not busy on Saturday night, unlike other restaurants on the same block. So cautious.
However, we were really surprised at how delicious, well prepared, and great value for money this place was. Very reasonable prices for downtown.
Tried the pork cutlets with rice and sides. Soul Food. Hit the spot.
Will definitely come back again.

I used to go to Daeji a lot when they had a Robson location. I felt like having a pork cutlet for lunch so I stopped by here yesterday.

Not much to say on ambiance, but lunch menu looked affordable and filling. I got Garlic Pork Cutlet lunch special for $13.99. It came with rice, radish, macaroni, salad and soup. Everything looked good until I was shocked to see amount of garlic on my food.

Surprisingly there was lots of garlic chips and minced garlic on top. I scraped so much of minced garlic from the meat. Garlic chips were bit dry instead of crispy. I took off 1 star because the garlic was too overpowering, the garlicky flavour was smothering my tongue for hours and hours.

Service was pretty good. The Korean owner offered me a refill on a side dish and offered me some. I had to get a soda to wash garlic flavour off my mouth. Other than that food was pretty good. Portion was just right for 1 person. Food was yummy and filling.

vancouver downtown restaurants are understandably glitzy so i am glad that places like this exist where you can get simple quick food for $15 or so. doesn't have the experience or the wait lines of ramen or sushi but its yummy and filling. foundation of the restaurant scene.

heads up tho service is kinda mid and they only take cash or et.

If you are looking for Ambiance probably find somewhere else. But if you are looking for old school Korean pork cutlet, this is the place! Pretty awesome portions and reasonable price.

I've eaten here a few times now and have been impressed by the consistency of their pork cutlet. While I haven't had the pleasure of trying this food in house, I have had take out about four times now and each time I have ordered the Spicy Cheese pork cutlet. I obviously cannot get enough of it!

I find that when a restaurant advertises their dish as spicy, it doesn't really accurately depict that word in flavour. However, this dish is genuinely spicy!! And it's incredibly well priced for the amount of food that you get: two cutlets, a side of rice, coleslaw, and macaroni. The pork cutlet is tender and breaded, smothered in cheese and spicy gravy.

Yum! I am very pleased with this food. Just note that it is very fast food like so it is greasy.

Not wow. I didn't like the number 1 - original pork chop with gravy. It tasted like some cheap dry-fried porkchop that just came from a cheap all you can eat restaurant (the gravy reminded me of Uncle Willy). So this is a Korean porkchop restaurant. My meal before tax and tip was $10.99 but I don't think its worth that price for the flavor. It came with sides. One of the sides was macaroni in mayo sriracha sauce. When I first saw it, I was like what weird cheesy color look it has. Then I was like eww. I don't take spice.

The decor is on the lower end. The place needs to be renovated. Floor and walls are dirty or tire looking.

Also the menu had a lot of items not available (see my picture). Server there doesn't speak fluent English but she does understand.

I don't think I will go back.

This place was alright. I expected something different when the pork katsu was with cheese, but I got the spicy sauce which gave an interesting twist to it. However the katsu was just alright, it wasn't amazing, but it was good enough.

The major concern was that they don't accept U.S. cards, they didn't specify that in the sign they had up front, so they forced us to use u.s. cash and said it's one to one. Meaning whatever our price of $28 in Canadian we had to pay $28 in U.S. would have been a 4 star cause the food wasn't bad and I liked the scenery; however, they basically stole my money.

Making good fried chicken seems to be a bit of an art. You need the chicken to be perfectly moist on the inside and yet stay relatively crisp on the outside. Dae-ji's soy chicken checks off these two boxes, and to boot, the sauce is amazing Quick disclaimer though: not every location makes the fried chicken the same. I've definitely noticed that the Dae-ji near Metrotown has some pretty dry chicken. The Dae-ji on Dunsmuir (and the one on North Rd.) definitely does it better. And one more note: Their "potatoes" are literally like chips instead of the usual potato slices haha.

Another thing is this location is definitely a lot smaller than other ones, so this isn't going to be a quick in and out sort of meal unless you get a cutlet meal maybe.

I used to go to Dae-Ji a lot for lunch until I got sick from raw chicken in my fried rice (almost a year ago). Decided to give this place another try because my friend wanted to have "Korean fast food". The food here is just ... meh for me now‍. Probably because I still remember how sick I was.

But the price and the portion are good thou. We had Kimchi Fried rice and Pork Cutlet.

Managed to convince my coworkers to come visit this place with me for lunch.

Right when we got there, the place was filled already and there was only one table left so they made us wait. Shortly after though, someone came after us and got seated at that table. It wouldn't have been a big issue but the table that we ended up waiting 20 mins for ended up being a two-person table anyways in which they just added an extra seat on the side for the third person...so not sure why they would make us wait the extra time when we ended up getting the same size table anyways....

Don't expect speedy service on a weekday lunch since there's only one person in the kitchen and one person taking orders and serving

I got the original pork cutlet which is great at first since the cutlet is just out of the fryer but after a while, it becomes soggy due to the gravy that's poured over the cutlet. My coworker got the fish cutlet and since that doesn't come with gravy, the cutlet is nice and crispy until the end of the meal.

The portions were quite filling; I didn't finish all of my rice nor the sides for my lunch meal. Definitely decently priced for what you paid for but there's better options for korean food in the downtown area.