RESTAURANTS:This Korean BBQ appeals to the pocket, if not the stomach
I CAN'T SAY I know very much about Korean food, but I'm morally certain that it can't be as bad as what's on offer at Bonga, the "Korean BBQ and Karaoke Restaurant" in Capel Street, Dublin. Mind you, Bonga has some redeeming features. If you are more concerned with bulk than with quality, this is the place for you. The idea - and it's a compellingly simple one - is that you have two hours to eat as much as you like. Yes, you can return time and time again to the buffet and pile your plate as high as you like and the charge will be the same: €28 from Thursday to Sunday, €18 the rest of the week. Children get special deals.
Now, all this would be fine and dandy if the food were good. Even moderately pleasant, to be honest. And I know there are many who will shovel anything into their gobs and give thanks, not for the taste, but for the sense that their bellies have been filled. And if this is you, go for it, by all means. But count me out because, oh, where to start? Because of the wretched excuse for barbecued meat, the oceans of oil and the alarmingly tepid temperatures of many of the dishes. That's just a flavour.
True, the tempura vegetables were encased in crisp batter that did not exude masses of oil and the Korean pancakes were not entirely unattractive (although I'm not sure why the seafood version seemed to contain tomato and nothing else) and, bizarrely, the least attractive dish to look at, sweet and sour pork, tasted almost pleasant.
This extraordinary dish, comprising grey meat in grey batter sitting on a distinctly greyish kind of sauce delivered the nearest thing to enjoyment I experienced all evening. And part of its appeal, to be honest, lay in its weirdness.
It was bound together with many of the dishes on offer by a common theme of reheated meat. When meat is cooked, cooled and then reheated or recooked, the texture changes and so does the flavour. It becomes waxy. You know yourself. The same effect can be achieved by simply keeping it warm for too long. And that's how every scrap of meat, bar the beef in a rather odd casserole, appeared to me.
Bonga states boldly, and no doubt truly, on its website that "Koreans are very skilled at making tasty barbecue/grilled meat". Well, not here.
The barbecued pork, lamb and duck all tasted the same: wildly overcooked, possibly reheated, certainly kept warm way beyond their best, deeply unattractive and distinguishable only from the barbecued chicken by shape.
Tough squid in tempura batter oozed cooking oil. "Roasted" noodles swam in the stuff, various pots and potions seemed to have started with oil as a major theme. And Bonga has the temerity to state on its website that "Chinese food tends to be much greasier or oilier than Korean food". I wonder how the Koreans would feel if such a sweeping generalisation were to be applied to their own food. And Korea is a lot smaller than China.
Korean sushi were pretty repellent: rather warm, the rice crumbling, tending to fall apart. Kimchi rice, on the other hand, was okay. Rather overdone from having been kept warm, maybe a little bland and light on the kimchi, but perfectly pleasant. The oddest dish, next to the sweet and sour pork, of course, was probably the one simply described as "creamy prawns" which featured, er, prawns and a kind of white sauce that tasted of absolutely nothing.
A selection of fruit, including some decent ripe melon, helped with a sense of cleansing after all that cooking oil. With a bottle of white wine at €22, mineral water and two of us eating at the €28 Thursday rate, the bill came to €82.30, which I would have been much better off spending round the corner at the Winding Stair or in one of the many brilliant Chinese restaurants which cluster round this part of town.
If you drink tap water and go Monday to Wednesday, you can stuff yourself for two hours and get away with a bill of €18. And if you're under six, which seems unlikely as you are reading this, you can do it for a fiver. Which is a lot of pocket money.
Well, we don't have the right to expect the Ely Wine Bar list in such a spot, but even allowing for that, it's hard to know what to order, given that they don't do beer. Our white Cune Rioja (€22) was dry, fresh and pleasant. Delamotte Champagne NV (€88) is a very grand fizz indeed and seems rather out of place here. Bouchard Fleurie (that would be Bouchard Ainé, I suspect, rather than Pere et Fils) is €29, if you like that kind of thing. Fantinel Prosecco (€31) would add a bit of fizz to the karaoke proceedings.