KJ Restaurant
65 High Street
New Malden
KT3 4BT

The Victims: Oonth, Limster

The Damage: £8 each-ish, again!

The Background: Our Korean restaurant crawl continues. We’ve been to Hamgipak–my favorite–and You Me. And I’ve been very impressed with our restraint. In our previous two stops, we’ve shared just two dishes among(st) three people.

I ordered at Hamgipak. Limster ordered at You Me. So we put Oonth in charge of ordering here, our third and final stop. (We may have done a fourth stop if anything else had been open!) He picks out some nigri and some hand rolls…just a few and just enough to fill us up.

Part of me wants another Korean pancake.

The Food: The nigri is cold. Very cold. Too cold. The unagi–eel–is great, but it feels high margin. They’ve cut it very thin. It looks very graceful there, across its bed of rice. But it doesn’t feel fat and generous. Hmmm.

The Verdict: I thought the service at KJ was sweet and the decor is pretty clean and modern. But the fish was so very cold. Almost as if it was still defrosting when they served it to us.

The post KJ Restaurant first appeared on Passport Delicious | Solo Travel Blog | Solo Female Travel.

You Me Restaurant
96 Burlington Road
New Malden, Surrey
KT3 4NT

Date of Last Visit: Sunday, November 9th

The Victims: Oonth, Limster

The Damage: £8 each-ish

The Background: Well, you’ve got the background on my last post. We’re on a Korean restaurant crawl. And I’m really ridiculously excited.

We wander down Burlington Road and peer in the windows of a few restaurants. You Me looks good, and Oonth thinks he’s heard of it before. We enter and are immediately shown a table in the back.

The Loos: Yuk.

The Food: We order the jap chae–glass noodles with vegetables–and some ox tail soup. The jap chae is full of ginger which is nice. But I’m not totally enamored. I keep thinking of the pajun at Hamgipak–the spring onion and cuttlefish pancake–and this pales in comparison. It’s just ok.

The ox tail soup is interesting. Full of egg. But again, not my favorite.

Oh, and the banchan? We have to pay for it!

The Verdict: Eh.

The post You Me Restaurant first appeared on Passport Delicious | Solo Travel Blog | Solo Female Travel.

Hamgipak
169 High Street
New Malden
KT3 4BH

Date of Last Visit: Sunday, 9 November 2008

The Victims: Oonth, Limster

The Damage: £16 for the three of us

The Background: Some people look at me like I’m crazy when I suggest a trip out to New Malden for Korean food. I’ve been wanting to go since my absolutely amazing trip to South Korea in 2004, where I never once had a bad meal and everything was really more than excellent. Oonth and Limster had both mentioned separately that they’d be up for the field trip, so we made plans to meet at New Malden Station at 12 for a little food crawl.

The Entrance: Hamgipak comes highly recommended by Su Lin so we made that our first stop. And it would prove to be the best stop of the day. Hamgipak is very small–we laughed when Limster asked where the toilets were and was given directions to the alley. When we arrived shortly after 12, it was already more than 1/2 full and the tables would turn twice if not three times before we departed.

The Food: We’re pacing ourselves, so we go with just one Korean pancake and a bowl of spicy soft tofu soup. Both are really really fantastic. Oh, and the banchan–little dishes of kimchee and assorted vegetables–are FREE and plentiful. (I hate it when people charge me for banchan; they’re normally complimentary in Korea.)

The Verdict: I wish there were a central branch. I would go here. A lot.

The post Hamgipak first appeared on Passport Delicious | Solo Travel Blog | Solo Female Travel.