I’ve been longing to eat Korean food ever since seeing Bong Joon-Ho’s phenomenal Oscar-winning film, Parasite, his interrogation of class and wealth on the plate. The wealthy mother tells her housekeeper to prepare jjapaguri, essentially an everyday dish, commonly made with two sorts of instant noodles. What makes this one exclusive and upper class is its topping of steak, from indigenous, highly prized Hanwoo cattle, which is way more expensive than Waygu beef would be here. Only the Korean wealthy can afford it.
Yet what had me really licking my lips in Parasite was not this, but the “Poor Men’s Buffet”, the scene where the poor family, initially flush from their employment, go out to eat in a cheap, eat-all-you-can buffet restaurant used by taxi drivers. What a feast! And so different from the beige variations on cooked breakfast you’d get here that it positively looks like health food. Leafy greens, steaming rice, noodles, barbecued meats, aromatic broths.
Unable to eat in downtown Seoul, we’re doing the next best thing: dropping into this second Bibimbap in Glasgow’s West End.
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Frozen from battling the elements outside, after drinking this warming, citrusy Yuja tea, which is actually very diluted marmalade- faintly bitter from the pith, not excessively sweet, we can feel our toes again. These tubular, chewy stir fried rice cake with its triangles of fried fish cake really work your jaws. The sweet spiciness of its sauce intensifies as we eat, but we just can’t stop having another bit. The pastry on these crimped, half moon-shaped, straw-gold, fried vegetable dumplings is ever so slightly bubbled, with a soft savoury filling that has the brassica whiff of Chinese turnip cake.
We rapidly realise that we’ve over-ordered. This is filling food. Big portions. Look at this spicy pork rice bowl, the small-grained pearly rice thick with thin curls of fat barbecue meat, slightly fermented in flavour with sour crunchy onions in it, topped with a fried egg and fishy, salty seaweed even has a miso broth with it. It’s a dish that never becomes monotonous: you come across something different in each mouthful that keeps you eating.
I suspect that were we to examine world culinary traditions, we’d find many recurring, universal themes uniting seemingly diverse nations. Take this gamja-jeon, a potato and spring onion pancake with its bouncy elastic heart and crisp edges. It bears similarities to Scottish potato scones, even though we dip it in soy sauce. But no way is this beef udon like any dish native to these isles. These slippery, bouncy udon noodles, this beef, beaten thin and tender, the delicate slices of raw mushroom and carrot, the sweet, piquant roar of flavour that slowly unveils itself- that’ll be the ‘spicy mayonnaise’- that crunch- could it be cucumber or water chestnut perhaps? Altogether these textures heaped together are fascinating.
I have no idea how authentic Bibimbap is, or how it compares to the real Korean deal, but like its city centre counterpart, it stacks up nicely on so many fronts: food, price, service. These Bibimbaps are supremely well run operations. Meticulously clean and organised, they run like clockwork. The interior here shares its elder sibling’s signature decor: colourful umbrellas, inverted, concealing light bulbs that hang from the ceiling; clean-cut modern wood surfaces: strips of neon light used more for colour that brash illumination.
Bibimbap is just one of so many restaurants that have contributed to our thriving, constantly improving, thrillingly diverse eating out scene in Scotland, one that has enriched our lives enormously. But these are difficult, fast moving times. Our restaurants now face an unprecedented crisis. Reluctantly, and for the time being, we have taken the decision to stop running restaurant reviews as the hospitality industry grapples with this challenge and navigates its way through it. Instead we’ll be running alternative food content.
I look forward to resuming reviews at a later date. In the meantime, I’d like to honour all the amazing people - chefs, their suppliers, proprietors, front of house staff, kitchen porters - who collectively make-up our wonderful restaurant culture. One day we’ll be flooding back to you with open arms.
Bibimbap West, 2 Partick Bridge St, Partick, Glasgow 0141 334 3030
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