Seoul Food & Studio
Belfast's home of cool
Seoul Food & Studio, high up on Belfast’s Ormeau Road, is the Apple Store of Irish restaurants.
It looks like a design studio, the sort of space where creatives in black roll necks might gather to work through ideas. It’s pure gorgeous, a tribute to modern Korean aesthetics in wood, steel and tile designed by the Korean firm Little Forest, and one which pays particular tribute to Obangsaek, the traditional Korean philosophy of five colours.
Happily for us, the ideas Jae Young and her chef Michael Hartnett are working through are culinary ideas, and their interpretation of modern Korean food is thrillsville.
The single-page menu offers the best-known Korean dishes – fried chicken; Bibimbap; Japchae; Tteokbboki; Kimbap – and then offers the diner a series of choices with each signature staple.
So, on our first visit we went for the tteokbboki – Korean rice cakes in SF&S’s signature gochujang sauce, served with fried chicken – and the bibimbap, served with spicy pork. When we placed our order at the counter, Jae cautioned that the sauce with the tteokbboki was going to be hot, and needed some persuasion that we were more than happy to have the kitchen light our fire.
We also ordered some pickled radish as a side dish and, from the menu of coffees and teas, we were advised to try the Dalgona Cloud Latte, a speciality of the Studio, and a pot of Daejak Hwangcha, a late Spring yellow tea from the Boseong region.
To be honest, you would drop into SF&S just for the drinks, which are just ace. The Dalgona coffee is a whipped coffee of instant coffee powder, sugar and hot water, whipped together until they become creamy, and then milk is added. It is named after a Korean sweet, and became something of an internet buzz during Covid. It is seductively delicious and, in SF&S, is topped out with a nasturtium flower.
The Daejak Hwangcha is the sort of tea that calms the soul, and to drink it in this beautiful room as the afternoon light streams through the windows feels like some sort of benediction.
The gochujang sauce with the tteokbboki was indeed hot, coating the cylindrical tubes of rice cake, and topped out with pieces of fried chicken with the crunchiest batter. Shards of scallion, half a cooked egg and a scattering of white and black sesame seeds finished a dish of great beauty and whizz-bang flavours.
The bibimbap was a tangle of carrots, mushrooms, courgette, rice and the thinnest slices of pork, underneath a fried egg with a perfectly crisp ruffle at the edges. With the crunchy radish pickle, which had become pretty in pink thanks to being cured in beetroot juice, this is comfort eating par excellence.
As we chatted away with Jae and the charming waiting team, they insisted we had to try their first collab, where their across-the-road-neighbour on the Ormeau Road, Al Gelato, makes a black sesame ice cream, which is served with Michael’s black sesame purée. It’s a beauty, and a must-have.
In both dishes, each element was exactly as it should be, precisely cooked, elegantly plated, offering cohesion, contrast and completeness, thereby making the dish greater than its parts, making the dish about more than just the cooking of the ingredients. This is Korean cooking that manages to be both a curated statement of a national cuisine, whilst also giving the diner a blast of invigorating soul food.
At weekends there are special dishes and you can BYOB, so we returned on a Sunday evening with a nice bottle, keen to see how Jae and Michael push the menu beyond its daily parameters. The special was wild mushroom and prawn pot rice with French black truffle, served with side dishes of beef tartare and smashed cucumber salad.
It’s a good day whenever Portavogie prawns are treated with the respect they deserve, and the shellfish were in top form in this beautifully realised creation, which had been cooked along with the rice and mushrooms and truffle in the heavy Korean Dolsot bowl, a confit egg yolk tying each element together. Magnificence personified, and beautifully counterpointed by the thin slices of beef tartare, topped with daikon radish and sprinkled with sesame seeds, and the smashed cucumber.
We also ordered the japchae – glass noodles with beef and vegetables – a side of kimchi, some miso aubergine, and a few pieces of Seoul fried chicken in Yang Nyom sauce because, you know, fried chicken.
Everything we ate was quietly perfect, without ever trying to be perfect. You might describe the cooking in SF&S as introverted, because it is largely about itself, with the eater as a reflection to the dish.
Jae describes the style and intent of SF&S as attempting to achieve “Intentional Emptiness.” The contemporary Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that this concept of emptiness in Zen Buddhism “represents an utmost affirmation of being.” To a Western mind, the idea of intentional emptiness appears contradictory. But this unique room, and this soulful food shows that in Seoul Food & Studio, there is no contradiction. Jae has created a “lingering white space” in which we can find that affirmation of being.
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I’d go for the beautiful tables alone!