‘So good I considered giving up cleaning my teeth’ — review

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It began in the mid sixties with James Brown. It was his personal groove, heavy on the downbeat — “on the one” as he called it — that gave birth to funk. It achieved perfection in the oeuvre of Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament/Funkadelic. “Peak Funk”, if you will. Funk is to be taken seriously. Which is why I intend to write the following review of a Korean restaurant in Bristol with an adventurous natural wine list, without using the word again.

Dongnae is the project of Kyu Jeong Jeon and Duncan Robertson, who met in Paris working under Joël Robuchon. Their first restaurant was in Bristol’s Stoke’s Croft, a tiny ramshackle joint which raised such interest among the city’s food lovers that I hired a camper van during the pandemic so I could park outside and eat their takeaway. Their new place is in an old butcher’s shop in fashionable Cotham. The interior is beautifully minimal. An austere counter in plywood and formica, clean and bright lit, barely restraining an open kitchen.

I began with a spectacular, precision hand-roll of Devon crab topped with Icelandic urchin roe. Not wrapped in the familiar nori seaweed, but a special one that the chefs bring back on their regular visits to Korea. A mat of virulent green threads, like a glamorous potscrubber, but with an assertive, almost tea-like taste that complements the creamy crab.

This is the first time I’ve ever tasted tofu. I’ve eaten kilos of it, but the only prevailing quality I could relate to you would be wet chalk. This stuff explained everything

Offerings from the charcoal grill come ssam-style with leaves to wrap, ssamjang bean paste and various small bowls of condiments. It is, thank God, Castelfranco season again so we can finally have leaves that taste of more than hydroponic nutrient drip. I ordered the “samgyeopsal” — literally “three-layer meat” — mainly because it’s the most poetic description of pork belly I could imagine. Any cuisine with a word like that needs my attention. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, this piece came with its own pickle of fermented sardines.

I had to add the dayboat mackerel, butterflied out, grilled and soy-glazed. C’mon. You know I’m a sucker for self-assembly food. What could be better than slapping this sort of stuff into leafy parcels and posting it down the little red lane?

Clam and mussel bibimbap comes in a “dolsot”, a stone bowl, on a thick slice of tree trunk, so even though it’s come straight out of the grill coals, it won’t burn its way through the counter like a reactor core gone critical. All that heat scorches the rice to the bottom of the pot similarly to Hong Kong “claypot” rice or Persian tahdig, so you’re enjoined by the staff to stir it up. To break up mussel fat and distribute it evenly, to disperse the clams and to chisel some of that chewy goodness off the bottom. This made me feel immensely empowered as it was, finally, something I could do competently with my chopsticks. Korean table etiquette favours metal chopsticks which, to my shame, I handle about as well as a baboon crocheting a doily. Fortunately, each place setting also includes a large spoon.

“5-year doenjang stew, local tofu, courgette” is, I will not lie, a brown stew, with seaweed, slices of mushroom, courgettes (or similar cucurbit), a few tiny pieces of meat and many large cubes of tofu, lurking malevolent ’neath the surface like a school of hippie sharks. This is not an Insta-genic bowl. And therein lies its fiendish brilliance. The innocent brown liquid in which all floats is made from doenjang — that’s like a miso — that the proprietors have been proudly rearing for five years.

And Christ, they’ve done a good job. It’s deep, complex, sophisticated, rich. Give it some private tuition and three months building a school in Ghana and it’s got every chance of getting into Oxford. It’s really quite disorientating. I mean, these are trace quantities of meat, but the bewildering depth is wrought from fermented beans, fungus and pure love. I can’t tell if it’s beef or pork in there, but I’m guessing whatever it is has been invited along solely to donate collagen. The seaweed helps to thicken things too. The mushrooms add a comforting wintry bass note to the general symphony of umami, and the tofu . . . 

I think this is the first time I’ve ever tasted tofu. Obviously, I’ve eaten kilos of it through a long career, but the only prevailing quality I could relate to you would be wet chalk. This stuff explained everything. Subtle fungoid flavours. Creaminess. Like a custard made with only the white parts of mushrooms grown in Parisian catacombs on the bones of saints.

It sounds strange, but I felt instantly at ease with the stew. It worked the same way as a bouillabaisse, a navarin d’agneau or a good Welsh cawl. Everything in there builds the juice before finally surrendering to it. I swear I’d happily live an eternity of back-to-back Cambridge Februaries if I could have this for lunch every day. We took small side dishes of mustard leaf, nabak, and “spicy water” kimchis, as if to cleanse the palate, but I wasn’t kidding myself. The stew was so good I seriously considered giving up cleaning my teeth.

Appreciation of other cuisines was historically led by now derided “expert voices”, such as Marcella Hazan, Richard Olney, David Thompson or Claudia Roden. Brilliant writers in our own language, with enough love to learn and champion another culture. In the UK, writers like Su Scott and Jordan Bourke have begun evangelising Korean food, but, for me at least, it feels like each time I walk into a restaurant, I’m learning anew.

Which is why I love Dongnae; different, gently inspiring, flat-out delicious, welcoming me to learn.