There’s a particular kind of disappointment that hits when you pull a piece of beef off the grill, take your first bite, and spend the next 30 seconds chewing. You followed the heat, watched the colour change, maybe even let it rest a little and still ended up with something that felt more like a workout than a meal. The frustrating part is that chewiness rarely comes from bad technique alone. More often, it starts long before the beef ever touches a flame.
At Nami Korean Grill House, the beef that lands on your tabletop grill is chosen with this in mind. The cuts are selected because they behave well under intense, direct heat, and that’s not a coincidence. It’s the result of knowing exactly what makes certain beef soft and yielding, and why other cuts fight back no matter what you do to them.
It All Starts With How Hard the Muscle Worked
Beef is muscle, and muscles that work hard during an animal’s life develop very differently from muscles that barely move at all. The more a muscle is used, the more connective tissue and collagen it builds up over time. That collagen is what makes well-used cuts so tough when they’re cooked quickly over high heat, because collagen doesn’t break down fast. It needs time and low, sustained heat to transform into gelatin, which is what gives slow-cooked beef that silky, pull-apart quality people go crazy over.
On a hot grill, that transformation simply doesn’t happen. The beef is over the flame for minutes, not hours, and collagen under those conditions doesn’t soften. Instead, it tightens and contracts. No amount of seasoning or sauce changes what’s happening at a structural level. The beef resists because it was built to resist, and a fast, high-heat grill doesn’t give it any reason to stop.
Beyond collagen, heavily worked muscles also have longer, denser muscle fibres packed closely together. How you slice these cuts matters enormously. Cutting against the grain shortens those fibres and makes chewing far more manageable, while slicing with them essentially hands you a mouthful of unbroken resistance. Both factors, the collagen and the fibre direction, compound each other. Get both wrong and the beef can feel almost inedible despite being perfectly cooked by any other measure.
The Cuts That Commonly Cause Trouble
Flank steak is one of the most flavourful cuts on the entire animal: deeply beefy, bold, with a richness that less-worked muscles can’t quite replicate. It comes from the abdominal region, which means near-constant movement throughout the animal’s life, and that history shows up clearly in the texture. The fibres are long and tightly packed, and without proper slicing technique and enough resting time, a grilled flank steak can be genuinely tough to eat despite tasting excellent.
Brisket tells a similar story, though even more extreme. It’s the chest muscle of the cow, responsible for supporting a large portion of the animal’s body weight every single day of its life. The collagen content is high, the connective tissue is dense, and the reason brisket is so celebrated in low-and-slow American barbecue is precisely that those long cook times, sometimes 12 to 16 hours, are what finally break all of that down. In a Korean barbecue context, the way around this is to slice it paper-thin, like chadolbaegi, so the cooking time drops to seconds, and the thinness compensates for what the structure naturally fights against. It’s a clever solution to a real problem.
Chuck, from the shoulder, is another heavily worked muscle with loads of flavour and an equal amount of connective tissue. Skirt steak shares much of the flank’s character: great taste, prominent fibres and a tendency to chew badly if the grill gets away from you. These cuts aren’t inferior in any absolute sense; they’re just built differently, and the grill exposes that difference immediately.
The Cuts That Stay Tender Without Much Effort
Ribeye is the cut that forgives almost everything you throw at it. It sits in the upper rib section, a part of the animal that does very little physical work, and that shows up in both the fibre structure and the fat distribution. The muscle fibres are short and fine, but more importantly, ribeye carries significant intramuscular fat, the marbling, that melts during grilling and essentially bastes the beef from the inside as it cooks. The result is meat that stays juicy and yielding even if you leave it on the heat a little too long, which is part of why ribeye is the anchor cut on so many serious KBBQ menus around the world.
Wagyu beef, a centrepiece at many Korean restaurants, takes everything that makes ribeye forgiving and amplifies it considerably. The marbling in high-grade wagyu isn’t occasional streaks running through the meat. It’s a dense, intricate network of fat woven through almost every part of the cut. When that fat renders on a hot grill, the beef becomes extraordinarily soft, almost dissolving in texture rather than requiring any real chewing. This isn’t just a sensory impression either; wagyu fat has a lower melting point than standard beef fat, which means it begins to render even before the beef is fully cooked through. By the time it reaches the table, the transformation is already well underway.
Tenderloin sits at the other end of the spectrum in terms of fat content but arrives at tenderness through a completely different route. It’s a small muscle tucked alongside the spine that does minimal work throughout the animal’s life, which means less connective tissue, fine muscle fibres and almost no resistance at all. Cook it fast over high heat, and it stays soft. Cook it a little too long, and it still behaves better than most cuts would.
Read: Prevent Undercooking and Dine with Confidence with These Safe Grilling Practices
Why Heat and Timing Affect Texture More Than People Realise
High heat isn’t inherently the problem. The problem is applying high heat for too long to a cut that isn’t built to handle it. For well-marbled beef like wagyu or ribeye, an extremely hot grill is exactly what you want. It sears the surface fast, creates that deeply caramelised crust and leaves the interior soft and juicy because the whole process is over before the fibres have time to tighten significantly.
For tougher cuts, the same high heat accelerates two bad things simultaneously: the muscle fibres contract and squeeze out moisture while the surface overcooks before the inside has had any chance to relax. What you end up with is beef that’s both dry and chewy, which is arguably the worst outcome possible from a grill. Thin-sliced cuts like chadolbaegi sidestep this entirely because the cooking time is so brief that fibre tightening barely has a chance to begin. The thinness is doing structural work that the cut itself can’t do on its own.
What Marination and Resting Actually Change
A good marinade, given enough time, alters how tough cuts behave on the grill. Acidic ingredients, the Asian pear in a traditional bulgogi marinade, citrus juice, even mild vinegar, begin breaking down surface proteins before the beef ever sees heat, pre-tenderising the exterior in a way that helps the cut behave more gently once it hits the flame. It doesn’t turn flank into wagyu, but it closes the gap in a way that’s clearly noticeable when you eat side by side.
Salt works differently but just as meaningfully. Given several hours, salt draws moisture from the muscle and pulls it back in, seasoning deep into the fibres while subtly loosening the protein structure along the way. Beef that’s been properly salted and left to sit overnight cooks differently from beef seasoned 20 minutes before grilling. It’s more evenly flavoured, and the texture is slightly more forgiving under heat.
Resting after grilling is the step most people skip, and almost every experienced cook insists on. When beef comes off direct heat, the muscle fibres are still contracted from the thermal shock of cooking. Give them five or 10 minutes, and they relax, allowing the juices that got pushed toward the centre to redistribute through the meat. Cut into beef immediately, and those juices run straight out onto the board, leaving the beef drier than it should be. Rest it, and the whole thing stays juicier, more tender and more satisfying to eat, not because anything dramatic happened, but because the meat was simply allowed to finish the process on its own terms.
The Grill Rewards What You Know
A hot grill is honest in a way that other cooking methods aren’t. It doesn’t have time to hide structural problems or paper over a cut that wasn’t suited to fast, intense heat. Every piece of beef behaves according to what it actually is, its history, fibre structure and fat content, and the grill makes all of that immediately visible in the first bite.
Knowing which cuts are naturally built for this kind of cooking, and which ones need real preparation to perform well, changes the entire experience. At Nami Korean Grill House, that knowledge is built into every choice on the menu, from the wagyu that renders and softens over a live flame to the premium cuts selected specifically because they reward the heat rather than fight it. If chewy beef has ever put you off grilling, the right cut changes everything.
Make a reservation to taste the quality, tenderness and flavour that great grilling starts with.
