Seoul Kimchi, 275 Upper Brook Street, Manchester M13 0HR (0161 273 5556). Meal for two, excluding wine: £30-£45
The cab rumbles down a broad street just to the south of Manchester city centre, of the sort even its planner would struggle to love. To one side is the hefty sprawl of the Royal Infirmary. To the other is the blood centre. If you’re leaking, or bits of you are falling off, this is clearly the place to be. It is not the kind of drag you would necessarily go down in search of dinner. But then sometimes worthwhile restaurants are the product of happenstance rather than design.
Seoul Kimchi is one of those. It was first opened in 2008 by Byunghee Kwon, though back then it was just a shop. She arrived in the city to study in 1997 and became aware of the lack of ingredients for her fellow Koreans. This included kimchi, the ubiquitous, fermented cabbage which she says she makes to a secret recipe taught to her at Seoul’s Kimchikan museum. Apparently South Korean kimchi is fiery and the northern variety is watery. That from Seoul is a gentle affair.
All of this chatter about secret recipes and regional variations is great for marketing. What matters is that, over the years, Kwon decided to add a couple of tables to her shop, allowing for some food to be eaten on site. Finally, last year, she reversed the business. There are a few shelves stacked with shrink-wrapped disposable bowls of instant noodles and bottles of obvious condiments. The rest of this tiny end-of-terrace corner shop is filled with tables, including the one I manage to bag just before 7pm on a Tuesday night.
It is by far the worst table for two I have ever had the pleasure of lunging for. It is right by the door; every time it opens the person sitting next to it has to lean in to provide clearance, and then, of course, they get a burst of cold air. It is flat on to the window, so the two of you have to sit side by side. You look out on to a quasi-industrial cul de sac. It is literally a view of a road to nowhere. If you are not a tiny person it is uncomfortable. I am not a tiny person.
This sort of restaurant has a noble place in the heart of a certain kind of menu chaser. The more uncomfortable the experience, the better it is deemed to be. Of course, darling, you’re crammed in so close together you can identify your neighbour’s brand of deodorant, but the dumplings are delicious. Yes, you have to stand all the way through, but the bone marrow pie is sublime. Naturally, they lock you in a dungeon and feed you gazpacho down a straw dangled through an iron grate, but trust me, it’s worth it.
I try not to buy into all this, but in the face of the food at Seoul Kimchi I am helpless. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s worth it. This is cheap, gutsy Korean soul food, which will curl your hair with a faint sheen of sweat if you order properly and help the world to settle firmly on its axis. There are, naturally enough, bowls of kimchi and shredded, vinegared cucumber to pick at while you study a menu of pure laminate. Half that menu is Japanese dishes, a frenetic list of katsus and teriyakis alongside sushis and sashimis. I am a demanding soul. I only order raw fish dishes from people who mean it. We ignore the entire Japanese offering.
Instead we start with jeon, a thick savoury Korean pancake, as crisp and lacy as a deep-fried doily, but soft and dense inside. Our version is filled with strands of squid and prawn, but like so much here can be made with chicken, beef, pork or vegetables. It’s one of those items that demands to be eaten within seconds of coming off the griddle. Rip off pieces with your fingers then pull them through the dish of sweetened soy. All you need now is beer. Slight problem. Seoul Kimchi is unlicensed. No matter: there’s a Tesco Express next door, doing a tidy line in Estrella beer. The corkage cost is minimal. Ask the waitress nicely and she’ll find you a bottle opener.
The increasingly popular Korean fried chicken comes here in round, boneless pieces. It lacks the echoing crunch of that made from whole bird, but makes up for it in dollops of a sweet and salty, hot and fiery sauce full of the fermented red chilli paste gochujang, the addictive culinary opioid at the heart of Korean food. We have a cast iron plate of galbi, Korean beef ribs sawn in thin strips through the bone. The meat is soy-marinated and deeply savoury, and rips pleasingly from the hard oval of rib in the middle.
Another superheated cast iron dish brings curls of pork and squid, blackened in places, rust brown in others, as more of the gochujang starts to crisp up. Underneath, caramelising in the extreme heat, are tangles of sweet, golden onion. All of these dishes cost around £8.
The enduring heat-transfer powers of a cast-iron cauldron play their part in a bibimbap – a rice bowl – of ground beef, the bed of rice starting to crisp up at the bottom. I mix in the raw egg, which starts to cook, and the beef, the chilli sauce and the spring onions. It is one of the single most satisfying items of comfort food available. It soothes you. It jolts you awake. Then it soothes again. Most of the main dishes come with portions of sticky, fluffy rice. If you choose a bibimbap you should ask them to hold a couple of those back or your table will quickly overfill with sad, unwanted side dishes.
Against all this a slightly terrifying looking bowl of spicy seafood soup, bubbling orange and red, slicks of chilli oil shimmering on the surface, doesn’t quite hold its own. But it is, I think, a matter of context. On the right sort of cold, damp day of the type Manchester excels in, the soup would feel like something that should be offered on prescription.
We finish our beers and pay our modest bill, for there is no dessert on offer here; Tesco will probably flog you an emergency eclair if you’re desperate. In the current political climate I imagine I’m meant to make some wisecrack about Kim Jong-un and nuclear war. But I don’t want to. Instead when I now think of Korea, I’m going to think of Seoul Kimchi.
Jay’s news bites
Like Seoul Kimchi, Little Korea at the western end of London’s Lisle Street, in Chinatown, has a Japanese menu. Ignore it. Come instead for all the Korean staples. The range of bibimbaps are particularly good, but I go for their exemplary Korean fried chicken, a cacophony of crunch and sweet and fire.
Protest news. The Real Bread Campaign is lobbying Michael Gove, secretary of state at Defra, to introduce legislation defining terms used to sell bread. They want sourdough defined as an ‘additive-free loaf leavened only using a culture of naturally occurring yeast(s) and bacteria’. They also want legal definitions for words like ‘craft’, and ‘artisanal’. Sign a petition at sustainweb.org.
The Hawksmoor juggernaut has hit a speed bump, with the parent company recording a pre-tax loss of £9m. The steakhouses are doing fine; the problem is with Foxlow, their neighbourhood diffusion line. In January they closed the Stoke Newington branch, their first restaurant closure.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
