Our verdict on this unassuming restaurant with a…

Our verdict on this unassuming restaurant with a 75-item menu

I must have walked past it 1,000 times. An unassuming yellow restaurant with a simple white sign, a little way up Gloucester Road.

It's often busy and always smells amazing, but I'd never actually gone inside.

So instead of going for an obvious BS6 restaurant like Pasta Loco or Casa Mexicana when making dinner plans, I thought I'd suggest what I knew only as 'the yellow Korean restaurant just up from The Prince of Wales'.

"Seoul GaJa!" My friend knew instantly. It turns out she's been eyeing it up too, so off we went.

Seoul GaJa offers up a whole host of authentic Asian cuisine, with Bibimbap, dumplings, noodles, beef tongue and teriyaki tofu just some of the dishes on the menu.

It isn't as fancy as some of the other Asian restaurants in town. The 75-item-strong menu is printed on both sides of an A4 sheet of paper that's been laminated. Its tap water was served up in an old sports bottle, rather than a fancy glass carafe, and its front door didn't seem to like shutting on the first try - but our waitress had the knack, and was quick to stop the draft.

The place was quiet when we first got there (at around 7pm on a Wednesday night) but it quickly packed out, with a quiet buzz about the place by the time we left.

After digging into some free kimchi and salad, we then started with some vegetable dumplings.

The dumplings at Seoul GaJa (Briana Millett)

They were crispy but gooey, full of flavour and came with soy sauce for bathing in - up there with the dumplings I've eaten in Asia.

For my main dish I ordered the tofu bibimbap, a rice dish served in a piping hot bowl with vegetables, beansprouts and crispy tofu. Beef, chicken and salmon options were also available.

The dish came with a runny egg yolk which mixed into the dish to almost create an egg-fried rice texture. The tofu was crispy and actually had flavour (let's face it, that isn't always a given).

The star of the show came in the form of the full-of-flavour miso soup on the side.

My dining companion went for teriyaki tofu, which they happily made vegan for her.

We were already planning our next visit before we'd even left the restaurant, having spent a reasonable £20 on a top-quality meal.

Verdict

If there's a better restaurant to prove the 'dont judge a book by its cover' theory I don't know it. Seoul GaJa may not look like much, but it's very much substance over style.