People often ask about restaurants I reviewed months ago but they have trouble remembering details that would identify the restaurant. Our memories aren’t what they used to be now that we rely on computers and smartphones for recall. The Chinese got it right when they dubbed the computer “diannao,” which translates as “electric brain.”

Well, Gen Korean BBQ House — which just moved into the cavernous former Tsukiji Fish Market space at Ala Moana Center’s Ho‘okipa Terrace — makes recall easy. There are only three things you need to remember to explain this restaurant to your friends.

1. Meat.

2. All you can eat.

3. Macaron ice cream sandwiches.

It’s also an easy formula for winning over diners in meat-centric Honolulu. There is an insane, and some would say obscene, amount of meat available, at $15.99 per person for lunch, and $26.99 per person for dinner. Note that because of the restaurant’s popularity, dinner prices are in effect all day on weekends and there’s always a two-hour time limit for meals.

For those prices, a party is allowed to pick from 28 items on a lunch menu, and from a roster of 36 items for dinner. I went with two friends for dinner, and out of the 36 selections available to us, we were able to get through only 13 plates that included various forms of plain or marinated beef, chicken, shrimp, octopus and pork. Each plate features 6 to 10 ounces of food. I suggest parking far away so you can walk off part of your meal afterward.

Although we came nowhere near trying all 36 dishes, I didn’t feel cheated at all. If each of the plates we ordered had been priced at a low $6, our order would have come to $78 (about $26 per person before tip) for a feast.

Sips include soju, sake and California reds and whites.

“Gen” means beginning in the Korean language, and the restaurant — with roots in California — introduces the next generation of yakiniku and buffet. It’s a buffet in the all-you-can-eat sense, but you don’t have to do the fetching.

Gen offers a sit-down experience, with waiters taking your orders to keep gluttony under control. The limit is four plates at a time, because most diners’ eyes are bigger than their stomachs. As with any other buffet, there’s no taking home unfinished food.

The room looks like a nightclub with cozy yakiniku grill booths throughout and blue lighting. Don’t wear anything you don’t want reeking of barbecue smoke afterward.

Both lunch and dinner menus start with Gen premium top-blade steak, cut so thin you’ll shred it while trying to unstick it from the grill top. It doesn’t have much flavor, but that probably won’t matter to most people when they can rely on accompaniments of green tea salt, sesame oil and ponzu sauce.

It’s the second offering of spicy pork bulgogi that gets a thumbs up, as does smoked garlic pork belly, though it had an oddly sour, banana flavor partially masked by the smokiness.

Four kinds of namul, such as kim chee, pickled cucumbers and daikon, are the only vegetables that will accompany your meal, along with an overly sweet, mushy potato salad.

I caused a little stir when I read the menu too quickly and incorrectly tried to order vegetable dumplings, causing two managers to rush to the table out of fear of a typo on the menu. What it actually said was “veggie dwenjang,” a soybean stew. Otherwise, the only non-meat entry is the glass-noodle dish chap chae.

Among dishes I would order again are the spicy Cajun shrimp and Gen signature kalbi that only show up on the dinner menu. That kalbi is absent at lunch is either a huge oversight or a smart way to avoid going broke.

For a variation on sesame, miso and soy sauce marinade flavors, garlic chicken comes with a jalapeno sauce, though it tastes more like oregano than hot peppers.

Fried food is not a forte here, so I would steer clear of overcooked calamari frites and popcorn chicken that tastes a lot like McNuggets.

The menu has an even share of hits and misses, but those who love quantity won’t likely care much about the latter.

If sampling with a big group, the experience is fun and it will be fairly inexpensive to sort out your favorite dishes. It’s so much fun that people tend to linger, the reason for the two-hour limit.

That’s where the macaron ice cream sandwiches come in. You’ll pay once for your meal, and again at the register for those tempting treats. The system gets you up, out of your seat and out the door. It’s a little rude and inconvenient, but in a restaurateur’s world, it’s rude to overstay your welcome while others are waiting to take your seat.

It’s great that Gen changes grill tops with every round of food, but be aware that unlike other restaurants that use rolling carts with racks to store and move the hot disks, here, waiters walk them across the crowded room. It’s only luck and awareness that prevent a run-in with the hot metal.

It’s a dangerous situation that needs to be fixed immediately.

Nadine Kam’s restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Advertiser.

Reach her at nkam@staradvertiser.com.