Chungdam, Soho

I generally try and avoid focusing too much on service on invited meals. If the front of house know you're in to review they usually try and be that extra bit more attentive, and occasionally too much so, and either way it's rarely an accurate reflection of the average punter's experience.

However, rules are made to be broken, and I feel duty bound to mention the service at Chungdam because it's amongst the most pleasant, knowledgable and mesmerisingly efficient I've come across in a long while. The experience of eating there is like having your own personal chef and confidant, who patiently explains how everything works, offers advice on what goes best with what, and occasionally personally handles the cooking of certain items with a grace and skill that's so utterly transfixing it's like watching close up magic done with beef instead of playing cards.

Now, great service is rarely, if ever, enough of a reason to visit a restaurant by itself, but fortunately Chungdam is serving rather nice food and drink as well, to boot. Our welcome drink was a soju cocktail served in a very pretty frozen coupe glass, wide and shallow, that felt very special even if it did require both hands to safely pick it up. Or maybe that's just clumsy old me.

As you might hope and expect, house pickles were the first foodstuffs to arrive. Sesame beansprouts, house kimchi and pickled radish all had things to recommend them, but we particularly liked the radish which had that irresistable funk of daikon matched with a gentle sweetness.

Japchae arrived alongside the pickles, a dish of glass noodles with beef and wood-ear mushrooms, amongst various other stir-fried veg. Perfectly decent, although looking back at the end of the meal, almost painfully overstuffed with various different cuts of beef and noodles, I think this is one dish we probably could have done without. Would make a nice lunch by itself though.

The real excitement began with the arrival of the first beef dish, raw tartare with slices of pear. The sesame oil made a good dressing but what lifted this dish was the addition of at least an entire bulb (I may be exaggerating... but not by much) of raw garlic, which made the thing burn in the mouth like you wouldn't believe. I'm a huge fan of too-much-garlic at the best of times, but this was unreal. I can only apologise to anyone who shared my carriage on the southbound Northern Line later in the evening.

Alongside that arrived seafood pancake - very good, particularly the citrussy dipping sauce it came with - but eyeing up the five more courses to come on the menu and given how generous the portions had been so far we just tried a square or two each. Bear in mind though, this was a press menu, so you should be able to construct yourself something a bit more reasonable on your own visit.

I was very excited at the prospect of the grade 1++ Korean beef listed on the menu, and it was certainly very nicely marbled and had a good flavour, but in conversation with our waiter it turns out it's not actually Korean, or officially graded 1++ (think Japanese Wagyu grading but for Korean cows) but the closest approximation they could find from UK butchers. Which is absolutely fine and wouldn't have been a problem if they weren't listing 1++ steak on the menu, which I'm fairly sure is against some trading standards laws. So they might want to look at that and put it in inverted commas or something in the future. Anyway we greedily demolished strips of this ultra tender steak with chilli, sesame oil, salt and a number of other interesting dips and sauces, some of which I have no chance of remembering how to describe or spell.

Brisket and short ribs both came sliced ultra-thin, thus needing no more than a few seconds on the tabletop grill before they could be eagerly gobbled down. The brisket came with some nigiry-style pieces of lovely vinegary rice which made a great foil for the beef, but in almost all cases with the beef I preferred it either with the soy dressing or the sesame salt, both of which brought out the flavours in interesting and addictive ways.

A final savoury course of cold noodle soup with kimchi, which even through the fog of beef-addled defeat I could tell was a very intelligent and nicely constructed thing. I half thought about asking for some to take home with me but didn't trust myself not to spill it on the tube, so in the end ate as much as I could - which unfortunately wasn't much - and left the rest. I hope they'll forgive me.

Matcha roll cake was more easy to devour - different stomach for dessert and all that - and was excellent, made by their sister Japanese cafe Shibuya. I've heard good things about Shibuya actually, particularly their ice cream, so I'm determined to make a separate visit there one day.

Meanwhile, I shall continue to digest my meal at Chungdam and recommend wholeheartedly it to whoever asks. True, they've dropped a point or two for mislabelling the beef and for not having proper charcoal tabletop grills like they do at the more authentic New Malden joints, but the former can be easily fixed, and the latter is very likely to be a limitation of their Soho license, who knows. Either way, all that is made up for in spades by carefully presented food of vigour and imagination, and service that you'd cross oceans to enjoy. I imagine it's very, very difficult to have a bad time at Chungdam.

8/10

I was invited to Chungdam and didn't see a bill. I think if you had a normal amount of food and a drink or two you might expect to pay something like £60/head.

Sollip, London Bridge

Since I decided, in the spirit of solidarity with a struggling industry, to only write up positive restaurant experiences, I expected that resolve to be tested a lot more than it actually has. In fact, since the beginning of July, only one dinner (out of more than I'm comfortable sharing) was so disastrous a tiny bit of the old me wishes I could have given it a good pummelling on the blog, but in fact even that moment soon passed. Life's too short to dwell on poor meals, especially these days.

The result of this new policy, though, is that recent posts run the risk of being a bit smiley-samey. All I can offer in my defense is that just because I'm not writing up bad or mediocre restaurants, that doesn't mean that I'm being extra kind to the ones I am reviewing - anywhere that's made it onto the blog in the last few weeks really is as good as I say it is, and I'm constantly astonished at how well restaurants are responding to their changing circumstances, not wallowing in self-pity (though that would be more than justified) but innovating and adapting and somehow, through all the madness, serving some of the best food I've eaten at any time. With all that in mind, then, let me tell you about yet another incredible meal I had just the other day at Sollip, a brand-spanking-new restaurant in London Bridge.

I'm generally a bit suspicious of "fusion" restaurants, as for all their laudable ambitions (and the occasional gem), the result is far more often Sushinho than Sushisamba. My suspicion of Sollip's Korean-French concept though, such as it was, lasted exactly as long as it took these gougères to appear. A perfect match of French patisserie and Korean spicing, they were baked perfectly to a soft, cheesey interior and delicate crust, and seasoned with an incredible soy bean/chilli powder which somehow conspired to make these already dangerously addictive little snacks even more irresistable. What a start.

Then, a "gamtae" (seaweed) sandwich, cut with machine-tooled precision, containing a soft, silky filling of briney seaweed and rich Caerphilly. I think they'd fried the bread in butter, too, so the golden sheen on the toast added not just crunch but yet more dairy loveliness. I had never had cheese and seaweed before in the same dish, I don't think, but the match now seems as natural to me as cheese and chive.

You can probably sense where this is going. The food at Sollip is not just exciting and rewarding, but genuinely innovative at every turn while still staying true to the Korean-French mashup concept. It's also beautiful - look at this thing, a daikon radish tarte tatin which had layers of earthy vegetables encased in impossibly delicate layers of glossy pastry. It was accompanied by something called "chilli chive potato cream" and all I can say is I'm glad I didn't know there was a thing in the world called "chilli chive potato cream" before arriving at Sollip because if I did I probably would have had a few sleepless nights obsessing about it. I've had a few since, as well.

Main course was a slab of braised beef short rib, soaked in a complex Korean sauce, shapely and solid on the plate but soft and yielding when sliced. It came alongside and interesting bit of cured cucumber, cooling in the kimchi style, and - a heartstopping moment - a little pot of rice with a knob of truffle butter, releasing flavour and aroma as it melted down. There's only one thing better than buttered rice, it turns out, and that's truffle-buttered rice.

I overheard the table next to mine (don't worry, there was plenty of space between us) asking for an extra sample of the fig from the fig creme brulee, such was its effect on those who tried it. This of course, is an open invitation to return to Sollip and try all of the dishes, not just the fig, that I didn't try the first time. But I can hardly complain the dessert I did order - this perilla (a kind of Korean mint) ice cream - was in any way a disappointment. Side-by-side the oil-based ice cream and granita made an unbeatable combination, apple and dairy and mint oil combining to great effect, with a layer of sesame rice for crunch.

Too often meals that are as controlled and precise visually as the food at Sollip undoubtedly is, you pay the price in flavour. I can think of quite a few restaurants over the years that in aiming for geometric exactness and consistency, in taking too long teasing the ingredients into the required form and shape, some of the immediacy and personality of the ingredients is lost.

Sollip manages to produce food of love and passion at the same time as it looking good enough to hang on the wall, and for that no amount of praise is enough. The gallery-like space and the artful dishes on one level brings to mind other Asian-fusion superstar restaurants like Bao or Xu, and I've no doubt they would be very pleased indeed to be mentioned in that company, as they should be. But Sollip is both a prodigal student of French and Korean cooking traditions, and at the same time a trailblazer in something genuinely new - fusion food that finally lives up to the name, and isn't just an excuse for gimmicks and punning menu items. I do hope I'm not boring you with yet another wildly positive review, but this wasn't going to go any other way. Sollip is brilliant.

10/10

CheeMc, Walworth Road

With deep and heartfelt apologies to those who call the area their home, there aren't too many convincing arguments to visit Walworth Road of an evening unless you have a particular fondness for betting shops, nail bars and standing traffic. Caught in a bit of a no-mans-land between the heaving Elephant & Castle roundabout (more recently less of a roundabout than a strange C-shape, but still heaving) and the genuinely enticing restaurant options of Camberwell, it's more of a conduit than an area, and up until quite recently its most significant impact on my life has been making me late for dinner at Silk Road. And I really do not like being late for dinner.

But, the merest hints of a dynamic food culture are flickering into life. As with so many (for want of a better word) unlovely areas of town, rents tend to be lower and with the freedom to be a bit more experimentational with your concepts and not worry too much about paying large investors back, London's restaurateurs can spread their wings a bit. True, Louie Louie wasn't quite my cup of tea in the end, but I like the fact that it's there, an okonomiyaki restaurant in South London, because why the hell not, a pleasing example that there are some people out there taking risks.

I wish I could tell you that I had a more successful evening at CheeMc than at Louie Louie, that I'd finally found my Korean chicken nirvana and that Walworth Road finally deserves to be spoken about in the same breadth as Camberwell Church Street or Brixton's Market Row. Sadly, we're not quite there yet, but it's still heartening to see a quirky, independent little operation like CheeMc pack them in on a rainy Sunday evening even if, in my usual tedious way, I could still find fault with a lot of the food served.

Partly my gripes were with the menu, which was large to the point of overwhelming and included a rather geographically ambiguous mix of Japanese staples like ramen, katsu, udon and takoyaki as well as Korean classics like bibimbab and soondooboo jigae. Had the food which appeared been better, I could have overlooked the game attempts to be Jack of all trades, but once a rather lacklustre bowl of udon ramen appeared, tasting of packet stock and raw onions, it quickly looked a lot less like idiosyncrasy and a lot more like an identity crisis.

Japche glass noodles were better, containing nice fresh vegetables and a confident hand with the sesame oil, and were pretty easy to enjoy in a straightforward kind of way. £7.90 does seem like quite a lot to pay for a some stir-fried vegetables and noodles, though. I could have them delivered to the door for that from a few places on Just Eat.

Bibimbab was good. Not astonishing, but good. More interesting once doused with gochujang, certainly, and there wasn't really anything significantly wrong with it, it just did its job as much as as a bowl of rice with various bits of veg on top can do.

The only real disappointment was the chicken. I don't pretend to be any kind of expert, on this or anything else, but I've had good Korean fried chicken, and I've had bad, and this was not good. Poorly butchered, in fact hacked into a strange collection of misshapen bits of pieces with broken bones jutting out at ugly angles, they were no less upsetting to eat than look at, being overcooked and tough, and coated in a chilli sauce that tasted of nothing much more than dry chilli powder. We soon wished we'd ordered a half portion instead of a full (£18.90), but even that would have been far too much to pay for a fairly mediocre pile of wings. Even an included bowl of sweet pickled daikon couldn't make this value for money.

With a drink each, the bill came to £16.31/head, great if your life's ambition is to eat vegetable noodles and poor fried chicken, not so great if it isn't. And I'm very much in the latter camp, so it seems my search for the Best of Korea goes on. Perhaps I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and travel all the way back to New Malden; if they can't get it right there then there's no hope for anyone. And for now, the Walworth Road will go back to its primary function of slowing me down on the way to dinner in Camberwell. If anything changes, though, you'll be the first to know.

5/10

Hana, Battersea

One of the many enduring mysteries of London dining, alongside the baffling popularity of the Breakfast Club and why hand wash and moisturiser are always presented in identical-looking containers, is why there seem to be so few genuinely excellent Korean restaurants. Much as I sort of enjoyed Asadal in Holborn, Assa in Soho and a couple of places in New Malden (I had a lovely meal at Jin Go Gae but it was a press dinner so not very representative), none have really blown me away and hardly any have warranted a return visit. Most of the Korean restaurants I've come across in London so far have been at best solid, with very similar, somewhat unambitious menus that never really offer great value for money. It speaks volumes that the best of the bunch is probably Zip Bab, which gets a pass for the decent price points and friendly service, even if it's a bit like eating in a doctor's surgery waiting room.

What Korean food needs is perhaps what Silk Road does for Chinese food or Kanada-Ya does for Japanese - ultra specialisation on either one dish or one specific region. A restaurant that unapologetically offers a focussed, coherent vision of what the best Korean food should be, and pours its energies into making that one thing (or one style) as exciting as possible, without sacrificing anything to any notion of what London is "ready for" or what is least likely to offend. If London is anything it's a city of risk-takers, and - so far - Korean restaurateurs are yet to take advantage of that.

If it sounds like I'm building up to announce the discovery of a Korean Bao or Hoppers, well, I'm not. Sorry. Hana is fine in the way that most Korean restaurants in London are at least fine but it suffers from the same lack of ambition as so many others, and barely stands out from the crowd even on Battersea Rise, a road which contains such joys as "Café Rouge with a GCSE" Côte, dull-as-dishwater pan-Asian chain Banana Tree, and, yes, bloody Breakfast Club.

I was pleasantly surprised at first to see that Hana offer three different types of kimchee. I'm reliably informed (though have never been myself) that in Korea the best establishments offer a huge variety, with each restaurant fiercely proud - and protective - of its own particular way with fermented pickled cabbage. The standard kimchee at Hana was decent, though would have benefitted from a bit more of a chilli kick, but the "Kkak Du Gi" (radish) was pretty bland and uninspiring and the "Ohi kimchee" (cucumber) had a rather offputting fizz to it. Perhaps this was deliberate, and I'm showing my Korean food ignorance here, but it spoke of something less "fermented" than simply "gone off".

"Hana Sticky Chicken" should have been wonderful. In fact I don't know how you manage to cook fried chicken in a soy/chilli sauce and not have it be wonderful, but Hana managed it, ending up with a sweet, bland dressing that had plenty of empty chilli heat with none of the flavour. One day a dish called "sticky chicken" will end up tasting as good as it looks on paper, but this wasn't it.

Continuing the theme, "Soontofu Jigae" should be a rich, beguiling seafood soup/stew, powerfully seasoned with anchovy stock and packed full of interesting shellfish. How on earth this ended up with all the personality of tap water is a complete mystery - like Liberace's front room it had plenty of colour and no taste.

I should point out in fairness that my companion said she enjoyed her chicken bibimbap very much, and polished off most of it. But the one bit of cubed chicken breast I tried was unpleasantly dry, and I'm not sure in what reality cheap chicken, rice and chopped veg should cost £10.95. Even Asadal only charge £8.50 for theirs and they have Holborn rents to contend with.

Service eventually settled down but started weirdly. Two members of staff, chatting at the bar, saw me furiously signalling for a beer but instead of coming over themselves waited until a third person appeared from the back and got them to see what I wanted. At first I thought this was because those first couple of people weren't serving staff, but then one of them later brought me my Soontofu Jigae. So I don't know what was going on there, other than me feeling like I was a bit of an inconvenience.

It's doubly frustrating that Hana wasn't the Korean restaurant I'd been waiting for, not just because it's within walking distance of my house (though this in itself should have set alarm bells ringing; nothing good ever happens in Clapham Junction) but because I know Korean food can be so good. Ask anyone who's ever eaten in Korea, and they'll tell you the street food markets and Buddhist temple restaurants and seolleongtang (beef bone soup from an ancient recipe) stalls of Seoul are the stuff of dreams. The best KFC (Korean Fried Chicken) I've come across in London was a short-lived collaboration between Gizzi Erskine and the Soho branch of Tonkotsu, and lovely though it was, it's a pretty clear sign that the Korean foodies of London need to seriously up their game. Come on guys, we're ready for you.

5/10

Zip Bab, Bloomsbury

I get used to moaning about the lack of decent quick, takeaway-friendly options in Holborn/Bloomsbury because that happens to be the corner of the city in which I spend most of my time during the week, but then perhaps there's no utterly ideal London neighbourhood for work lunches. Soho probably comes closest, but even there the queues at the good places mean you spend most of your time standing in the rain instead of eating, and you'll still pay for the privilege. Though I wouldn't trade my daily commute on South West Trains, shonky and stressful as it is, for the pressure-cooker Seoul Metro, I do wish I had the choice of a thousand spare seats at a good noodle bar for lunch like the lucky workers of Korea. I'd actually look forward to lunches like that.

So I strongly considered keeping Zip Bab to myself. I should say from the start that I have never been to Korea, and the entirity of my knowledge of Korean food is gleaned from a couple of meals in New Malden (Jin Go Gae is excellent) and the odd popup by Gizzi Erskine. This, I know, is not any kind of position to be credibly ruling on the authenticity or otherwise of anywhere calling itself Korean. But as far as I ever have an intuition for these kinds of things, Zip Bab feels authentic, and the food feels like the kind of thing hungry Koreans would snaffle down of a lunchtime, and I'm worried that once the word gets out it will turn into another Kanada-Ya - impossibly busy, a theoretical restaurant, just a memory of noodles past.

In the meantime, though, I'm determined to make the most of it. Excuse the range in quality of photos - I only had my big camera on one of my three visits - but hopefully they're enough to demonstrate that whatever it is that Zip Bab are doing, they're doing it very well indeed. My first lunch involved a bit of a mistake on my part - I really wanted the luminous orange Korean fried chicken, in that addictive sweet chilli sauce, as proudly displayed on the window menu. Unfortunately I wasn't paying attention properly and accidentally ended up with "soy chicken", the same big, strong wings and crunchy batter but a different finish. They were still lovely things though, and not much of a downgrade.

Also on that first visit, and not pictured, was a bowl of sweet and sour pork on rice noodles which verged on familiar to this Englishman but was incredibly easy to enjoy nontheless. And in a strange way, though I have no evidence at all to back this up, I can imagine Korean people eating it of a lunchtime, alongside a little bowl of their very decent house kimchi. So I will continue to imagine that.

Despite the food on day one being very good if not spectacular, enthusiastic and charming service and the certainty I'd not yet seen the best of the place necessitated a return visit, and it was here that the fireworks really started to fly. Zip Bab do a small number of "set" lunches, where you pick a main and are given a selection of salads and sauces to go with it. I'm afraid I can't remember how this was listed on their menu, but a quick Google for "Korean lettuce wrap set" reveals it could be something called ssam and I'd advise you to look for that name if you ever fancy a visit. Because it was great - lovely soft pieces of pork, joined with a heavily dressed green salad, topped with a fantastic chilli-miso sauce (also available in bottles on each table), and wrapped in butter lettuce, sort of like a green taco. Enormous fun and quite unlike anything else I've ever had for lunch in Bloomsbury.

By this point, Zip Bab had me sold, so I could hardly not return a couple of days later to sample the original flavour KFC I'd missed out on the first time. It was, as I suspected it would be, lovely - generous of flavour and portion size, with a great sweet/sour chilli dressing and piping hot straight from the fryer. This is the quintissential Korean comfort food, and admittedly it wouldn't say much about a Korean restaurant if they couldn't get this right, but it was still a joy to get up to my elbows in sauce and embarrass my lunch companion. They provided a couple of hot towels, but I was so coated in the stuff I had to get up and rinse off in the bathroom before facing the world again.

And, needless to say, I'll be back again and again, at least until the rest of the city catches on and they're queuing down the street. I spot yet more unusual things on the extended menu, such as a "spicy whelk salad", which sounds like it could be interesting, and I bet their bibimbap is worth the price of admission, but perhaps I'll never need anything more than a portion of sticky, spicy wings, rice and a small bowl of kimchi, and a quiet table in the corner to cover myself in it all. Work lunchers of Bloomsbury, I can only apologise in advance.

8/10

Wing Wing, Euston

The last few months saw the opening of two brand-new chicken concepts in London. To be honest, there have probably been a whole load of other new chicken concepts open in London, but I didn't get press releases about any others so they don't matter. One - Chik'n in Baker St - is from the guys behind Chick'n'Sours and is, predictably, brilliant; high quality chicken matched with a variety of interesting Asian-Fusion sauces and sides, and all for barely more than you'd spend at your local Chicken Cottage. It's great, and you should go.

The other is Wing Wing. And it's not terrible, or even particularly expensive, it's just not what I was hoping it would be. For a start, they call themselves Korean. And what do you think of when someone mentions Korean Fried Chicken? For me, it's piping hot wings in a medium-crunchy batter, doused in a bright red sweet/sour sauce and coated in sesame seeds. "Dakgangjeong" I believe they're called and I've found no better example recently than these, which were a special collaboration between Gizzi Erskine and Tonkotsu a couple of months back.

It's hardly Wing Wing's fault that I'm projecting my own expectations of what Korean food should be on people that - let's face it - are perfectly entitled to decide that for themselves, but shouldn't that style at least be an option on what is quite a large menu? There's room for katsu bao, chicken burgers, wraps, fish & chips(?), rice boxes, salad boxes and god knows how many desserts but the main event itself - the chicken - comes either as wings or drumsticks (no thighs or breast or option to have whole half or quarter pieces) and brushed with three "glazes" that are so lightly applied that they all just end up tasting identical.

On my first visit I tried six "hot" wings, which were certainly hot in terms of temperature but barely registered at all on the Scoville scale. The chicken itself was strong and healthy-looking, with good firm flesh and nice big bones. And I suppose there interest in the skin, which was delicate and gave with a nice crunch. But it just didn't taste of anything; not spices, salt, even MSG would have been something - it was as if some crucial part of the cooking process (ie. a nice sweet/sour sauce) had been missed out.

Drumsticks suffered from all the same issues as the wings, and despite choosing the "soy garlic" glaze had the same dry coating and tasted completely indistinguishable. They weren't bad, just boring, and animal welfare issues aside if I had the choice again I'd stick with Chicken Cottage. In fact, I don't know how Wing Wing treat their chickens as their website doesn't say, but they do seem a little more robust than your average high st place so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.

Other menu items fared little better. A chicken wrap was probably the best of the things we tried, containing plenty of chicken and an interesting kimchi-spiked (I think) coleslaw.

But katsu bao was very weird, the bun tasting more like deep-fried brioche than the usual steamed style and the chicken suffering from the same lack of seasoning and excitement that affected the wings and drumsticks. Kimchi coleslaw on top was nice though.

So, little to love but little to hate either. For a place that on the face of it at least appears to be trying to stand out from the crowd, with its bold interior design and alcohol license, the only thing remarkable about Wing Wing is in the end how unremarkable it is - it's just another fast food place amidst the tourist tat of Euston, easily ignored. Which is a shame, really, considering what could have been if they'd just done some proper Korean fried chicken. And maybe they will, one day. Until then, I'm stik'n with Chik'n.

5/10

Sorry forgot to take a photo of the 2nd bill