Jihwaja, 353 Kennington Lane, London SE11 5QY (020 7582 4680). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £50
What would it take to elevate the humble Greggs steak bake from mass-produced, nutritionally enthusiastic, brilliant-when-you’re-drunk-even-better-when-you’re-hungover food-on-the-go option, to hipster fetish object? I suspect the answer is about 5,500 miles, or the distance between London and the capital of South Korea.
Stay with me here. Imagine that the equivalent of your bearded hipster in Seoul somehow manages to import a crate load of steak bakes. They fill their Instagram feed with pictures of flaky pastry, slashed on the diagonal and bulging with pieces of braised cow in steaming, flour-thickened gravy. There are top shots and gaping side shots and exclamations of appetite and lust. It would be all: “Look at this bad boy!” and “Get in!” In Korean. Newcastle’s finest would, on its travels, become exotic. By being so far from home, it could become the one thing a Greggs steak bake has never been: ineffably cool.
I was thinking about this after staggering out of Jihwaja, a hilariously brilliant new Korean place in London’s Vauxhall, having had my senses assaulted by platters of their fried chicken, the colour of a British expat’s Spanish tan. I felt like I had been glazed inside and out by their sweet-salty chilli sauce. My ears were echoing from the crunch. I was half man, half deep fat fryer – and all in a good way. The point is that if you step back a short distance from that Korean fried chicken, which is about as cool a food item as you could hope to find in these, the early days of 2017, it really is utter filth. In South Korea it’s merely bar food. Here, a Korean fried chicken habit is proof that your whole damn fist is bang on the pulse.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of filth. The Greggs steak bake is equally filthy and God knows I’ve done a few of those in my time. (Before the Greggs press people get in touch, full nutritional details are available online. Each one is 405 calories, apparently.) But because the Korean fried chicken is from 5,500 miles away it’s a different kind of filth. It has been sanctified by the badge of authenticity. It belongs to another culture. Forget the guilt. Fill your boots.
The funny thing is that it hasn’t belonged to that other culture for very long. Like superheroes, all dishes have their origins, and this one is no exception. For a decade after the end of the Korean war, the country remained one of the poorest on the planet; meat was rarely part of the diet. According to the Korea Herald newspaper, fried chicken didn’t arrive until 1977. In 1982, a café called Pelicana Chicken launched the familiar double-fried, chilli-sauced variety (though there are other claims). It turns out Korean fried chicken as we know it isn’t even as old as Ant and Dec.
Like so much of Korean culture it is an expression of modernity, and Jihwaja delivers that in spades. It started as a street food operation by Tottenham Court Road tube, where a bunch of Korean restaurants huddled before the Crossrail development gouged a hole out of the capital.
Its new permanent site in Vauxhall is deep and narrow, and broken up into cosy karaoke lounges, seating four to eight. They are all soft springy couches, downlighters and plasma screens. An evening in one of these, getting off your nut on bottles of the grain-based liquor soju and howling tunelessly at the ceiling would linger in the memory. Unless the soju intake was properly enthusiastic. In which case all you’ll remember is a blur of fried chicken and longing. Or what’s known as a standard night out in south London.
At the back is a slightly larger dining room, with another plasma screen playing K-pop on a loop – lots of mop-haired boys, lip-syncing songs of moist devotion, while reaching out to grab a fistful of air and drag it back in. There are doorbells on each table with which to summon waiters. The menu starts with what they describe as “Korean-style tapas bites”, a phrase we shall never speak of again. We will call them starters. There are lightly battered and deep-fried seaweed spring rolls of glass noodles, alongside a soy dip, which are a pleasing mix of crunch and bite.
Deep-fried chicken dumplings are a little greasy, but satisfying for all that. Crisp, spongy pancakes made with pumpkin, puffing hot sweet breaths as you bite in, are a good way to pass the time while you wait for the main event. A kimchi salad, heavy with the deep funk of fermentation, is enough to make the teenagers accompanying me blink and mutter: “I’m not sure about that.” In other words the cabbage is bang on.
As a veteran of one of the last charcoal-based Korean barbecues in Los Angeles, where the smoke gets in your eyes and your hair and your memory, the Korean barbecue here is a little disappointing. You don’t get to cook anything for yourself. The beef galbi is a pre-plated sweet soy stir-fry, but the accompanying seaweed rice balls, laced with the iodine-rich tang of the shore, are utterly compelling. Likewise the bibimbab, or rice bowl. It’s piled with a lightly spiced braised pork belly, sautéed vegetables, a fried egg, with a bottle of gochujang (chilli bean paste) on the side to give everything punch and attitude. Pour on sauce, mix together into an artful mess and dig in. And all this in a cauldron so hot that the rice at the bottom crisps as you eat.
And then the fried chicken, at £16.90 for the whole bird, hacked into pieces, battered and battered again and drenched and just generally debauched. We try both the standard, smothered with gochujang, soy, honey and more chilli, then sprinkled with sesame seeds, and the soy garlic version. To our surprise the latter is slightly sweeter than the former. But both are completely outrageous: crisp in a way that echoes through your jaw and muffles chatters. They are salty and sweet and fiery. On the side is a crunchy salad of pickled vegetables to cut through the assault, or give you mouth space for more bird.
The plasma screens sparkle and the glossy eyed K-pop boys sing on, but I only have ears for this shameless chicken; this brazen expression of a country with a complete and utter obsession with the business of now. A visit to Jihwaja is dinner deep in the 21st century. And I like it there.
Jay’s news bites
I’ve mentioned the BBQ chain Bodean’s before, on account of their ribs. I do so again now because of their take on Buffalo chicken wings, invented at the Anchor Bar, Buffalo, in 1964. The real thing should be deep fried and furiously hot and sour on account of the vinegar-based cayenne pepper sauce. The Bodean’s version is terrific (bodeans bbq.com).
Happy birthday to the theatreland stalwart Joe Allen which celebrates its 40th anniversary. A training ground for the likes of Jeremy King of the Wolseley and Russell Norman of the Polpo group and which once boasted Rowley Leigh as head chef, the self-styled American brasserie is a key part of London’s modern restaurant story. Infuriatingly the site is under threat from a plan by Robert De Niro to open a hotel (joeallen.co.uk).
Cereal-based cafés may be annoying, but it could be worse. Amsterdam is to get a restaurant with a menu based entirely around avocados. ‘The possibilities are endless,’ a founder of The Avocado Show told a local newspaper. No they aren’t.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
