If you think real barbecue is the sole province of Kansas City or the Lone Star State, the next time you get a hankerin’ for some grilled meat and sauce, head over to , Richmond’s only Korean restaurant, for some “fire beef.”

Korean barbecue is not your pulled pork or minced beef on a bun deal, but more along the lines of a backyard cookout where you marinate meat and char it over coals or gas-heated lava rocks. Only here it’s done on an indoor, tableside hibachi, first by your server and then by you.

For four of us, we called up two orders of pork and two orders of beef barbecue ($14.95 per order). Before they arrived, about a dozen bowls with small portions of side items (included in the price) showed up including kimchee (fermented spicy cabbage), spicy cucumber, small bean sprouts, seaweed and chunks of pickled potatoes, condiments to eat with the barbecue.

The waitress grabbed hunks of the meat and heaped them on the grill. When the iron grate was covered, she politely left the room and left the rest of the cooking to us.

Here’s how you eat it: Tear off a small section of lettuce, put it on your plate, and using chopsticks or a fork, take a piece of meat and place it in the middle of the lettuce. Take a clump of rice, put it over the meat and scoop up some of the special sauce, roll it up and pop it in your mouth. The mix of vibrant flavors with soft rice and silky lettuce is a unique experience. Then try a little kimchee, the peppery national side dish of Korea.

— Noel Patrick

You’re not going to find many surprises on menu, but you’ll probably find some among the copious plates that are brought to the table.

The appetizers are mostly Greek classics, from lemony avgolemono soup ($3/$3.50) to taramasalata ($5.95). Somehow Cajun-inspired grilled shrimp ($8.95) gets in, along with some mundane fried mozzarella sticks, but we settled for a couple of the classics. The calamari ($5.95), crisp and tender, are served with tzatziki, a refreshingly cool yogurt-cucumber dip. It is enough for at least two, as is the spanokopita ($5.95), two thick-cut diamonds rather than the expected phyllo-rolled triangles.

For main dishes ($8.95-$19.95), you have more than two-dozen choices, many of them pasta-based. One, called simply “seafood pasta,” is linguini with shrimp and scallops in a cream-based lobster sauce, which gives a luxuriant finish to the nicely cooked seafood.

This winged horse may not paw any great spring of inspiration, but he sure can cook. Let’s hope the stove stays hot for a long time at Pegasus.

– Davis Morton