Seoul food

EATING OUT:There's a sense of adventure on the strip of foreign restaurants that make up Dublin's Parnell Street

IT’S TIME TO be adventurous. A Sunday-night stroll around a Chinese supermarket on Parnell Street in Dublin finds a hot deli counter with almost everything looking like the contents of a takeaway carton, until your eye reaches the dried duck heads. Picture the residents of your local duck pond, beheaded, braised in San Tropez, and then sundried. I’m tempted to buy one and produce it at the dinner table when one of my sons is refusing his spag bol.

The last time I ate on this street it was a fairly dismal experience. We sat under fluorescent light with a television, showing a documentary on beautiful Korean films, while the other table enjoyed what looked like much better food than ours. Tonight I’m heading to Kimchi, a Korean and Japanese restaurant attached to the Hop House pub. It’s at the O’Connell Street end of Parnell Street and a quick stroll from the Gate and the Savoy. It’s best described as Parnell Street-Lite, geared towards western customers as well as Asian diners, with a clear menu in English and some photographs, although some of these bear as much resemblance to the dishes as I do to my student ID photo.

Kimchi is a Korean national dish, a fermented cabbage mixed with other vegetables. So Kimchi on Parnell Street is the Irish equivalent of finding an Irish restaurant called Breakfast Roll in downtown Seoul. The place is pleasantly unstylish with a scuffed pine floor and the comfortable kind of country kitchen tables and chairs slotted into panelled booths. There’s a large room area at the back where bigger groups can eat at long tables. To one side is the bar, which has a television screen the size of a gable end at the top. Thankfully it’s not visible from the restaurant.

We are greeted by a friendly waitress and given a table for two in a booth. Carol orders white kimchi to start and a portion of dakgalbi, a chicken dish with chilli. It’s listed on the menu with a lone chilli beside it. We are used to seeing chillies on a sliding scale. Here there are no grades, just single chillies peppered throughout the list. One chilli means heat here, lots of it. The waitress smilingly asks if she is sure she wants this as it’s very spicy? Carol decides on a teriyaki dish instead.

I’m going for spring rolls to start and a Korean main dish of bulgogi, thinly-sliced marinated beef. The tables are set simply with paper napkins, a dessertspoon and some stainless steel chopsticks. They’re smooth and nicely weighted, trickier than wooden chopsticks. I’m guessing a slippery noodle dish would be beyond my dexterity. Later I hear someone requesting wooden chopsticks and these are provided, as are forks. The restaurant also serves very reasonably priced sushi, which looked good.

My spring rolls are as expected, small, nicely crisp rolls with a sweet chilli sauce and a sprinkling of salad with a mustard dressing. The filling includes minced carrots and green beans. They’re not spectacular but they’re well presented and un-oily, and at €3.50 they’re pretty excellent value.

Carol’s white kimchi comes in the form of two generous cubes of white cabbage, shredded radish, ginger and spring onions (called green onions here). The first surprise is that it’s served cold but once you get over that, the flavours are clean and vibrant. The fermenting process has softened them to a chewy consistency that’s very good. They’re a blast of freshness.

The mains come in very generous portions. My advice would be to skip the starters and dessert (more of which later) and come here for a Korean main course. My beef has a light soy and sesame seed sauce with well-cooked onions, spring onions and courgette strips. The beef is slightly fatty but tasty. No expensive cuts have been used here but it’s been well prepared. The three side dishes come on a separate plate, all cold, some potatoes that look like they’ve been marinated in the same sauce as my beef, a small mound of bean sprouts, and some cubes of spiced tofu. Unlike the white kimchi, these don’t work cold but the beef is good. There’s also another portion of kimchi, spiced this time. Carol’s chicken comes with good fresh-tasting vegetables. And we have a bottle of Italian Villa Teresa Pinot Grigio (€19.99).

The dessert menu sounds interesting and there’s been so much food, we decide to share one with a separate order of su jeong gura, a cinnamon punch. This is poured out of a can into a glass and tastes like super-sweetened cold non-alcoholic mulled wine. I can’t finish it. The dessert, a sweet red-bean jelly served with a citron sauce, is where we fall down the cultural gap and get lost in translation.

There are several triangles of the thick, cold jelly standing around the sticky pool of “citron sauce”. When it arrives, it looks, smells and tastes like it has been tipped out of a marmalade jar, which I suppose could be very loosely described as a sauce with citrus fruit in it. We decide the jelly, which has a dense, mealy consistency and strangely unsweet flavour, is what a scented candle would taste like if you softened it and chopped it up.

There’s also more alluring green tea vanilla ice cream and chocolate cake options on the dessert menu. But this is not a restaurant in which you should save yourself for the dessert course. It is a welcoming and friendly taste of Korean cooking. With main courses coming in at €13 it’s a pretty good package for a dinner and movie night out. Dinner for two with a bottle of wine came to €63.60

Kimchi

The Hop House, 160 Parnell St, Dublin 1, tel: 01-8728318

Facilities: Dingy and decorated with angsty graffiti

Music: Not too loud spill-over from the bar

Service: Excellent, friendly and efficient

Food provenance: None

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