Kerb and Caravan, King's Cross, London

I'm still here. Just. A trip to Somerset, a hell of a lot of tennis (watching not playing) and the sudden onset of a proper summer have all conspired to make my blogging even more sporadic than it was already. Lolling around in the sun and watching Murray win Wimbledon has taken precedence over waffling on about what I've been eating. With good reason I hope you'll agree.

So, now that the ghost of Fred has finally been laid to rest, back to business as usual.

A flying visit to Kent for work the week before last meant a change of trains at St Pancras. A few years ago you'd need a good couple of hours spare to make venturing from the northbound stations worthwhile, but the King's Cross area has come on in leaps and bounds in recent times, and boasts a whole host of options from sherry bars to street food, all within a few minutes walk of the station platforms.

It was the latter option that tempted, the street food collective formerly known as eat.st has expanded and relaunched as Kerb. They now have a whole host of stalls on daily rotation on the new pedestrian street round the back of King's Cross.

Kimchi Cult, purveyors of Korean style burgers, was the one I'd been looking forward to most. I bloody love Kimchi and was intrigued to see how its cabbagey funk worked outside its usual environment. I'm pleased to say it works very well. The spice and savour of the stuff works a treat with a high quality beef patty and plasticky cheese, in the same way that anything else pickled works with a burger or sausage.

It was all beautifully put together; bun the right texture, the right sort of melty cheese, very good meat in the patty, but the whole just didn't do that much for me. The presence of kimchi just made me crave a great bowlful of it in a porky noodle soup.

I can't blame Kimchi Cult for this, I think the realisation is finally dawning that I don't really care about burgers. The relentless obsession with the things in the food world in recent years has brainwashed me into seeking the burgery holy grail, but I don't think it exists. They're just not that exciting. Give me a fine steak or a Thai salad or a bowl of raspberries or a pork pie instead please.

£6 for the kimchi cheeseburger. Personal preferences aside this was a top notch burger, but six quid still seems to be pushing it a bit. I had plenty of room for lunch number two ten minutes later...

..which came courtesy of Yum Bun. I was hoping for a pork bun, but I'd left it too late so had to settle for the Japanese fried chicken bun. Garnished with iceberg lettuce, tartare sauce and chilli dressing this was a bit bloody lovely. The soft bun was a delight, just a little bit chewy but light and airy with it. The chicken: think KFC popcorn chicken with better meat, better batter and better frying skills. Very good.

£3.50 for one of these, or £6 for two. As with the burger, a bit overpriced I'd argue. I do think that the food served at all of these stalls is very good, and deserves comparison with similar restaurant offerings (I'm sure it's better in many cases) but lunch can be had at many restaurants for not much more money, and with the considerably larger overheads of a building, waiting staff and so forth. Minor gripe over, and ultimately the prices are pitched at what the London market will bear.

Between my burger and bun I grabbed a takeaway coffee from Caravan. I really want to eat at this place, the menu reads like a dream, but there wasn't time on this occasion so a coffee had to suffice. A £2.40 flat white (very fairly priced for the location) was good, but not as good as I'd been led to believe the coffee here would be. The coffee itself was excellent, the execution just slightly off though, the texture of the milk a little thin and not as smooth as it could have been.


Kimchi Cult 7/10
Yum Bun 8/10
Caravan coffee 7/10

Kimchi Spam Fried Rice

Question: what's the best way to cure what ails you, especially if what ails you is a hangover?

Answer: kimchi spam fried rice.

With only four ingredients one can conjure up the most sordidly delicious, feculent plate of food imaginable. It's a sort of English breakfast in turbo Korean form, all earthy pig, fat, carbs, sweat and tears. Or something. With added spice.

It's also far easier to cook than the complex plating and timing nightmare of a full English, a roast or any more traditional Sunday fayre. One pan. Four ingredients (and some oil). A gentle proposition for the fractured brain.

Chop half a tin of spam (just the contents, not the tin) into strips. Heat up a wok and fry the spam strips until starting to crisp at the edges. Throw in a big handful of roughly chopped kimchi and its juices and a bigger handful of cooked rice. Stir-fry for a couple of minutes, then spoon the whole lot into a warm bowl. Put the wok back on the heat with a good glug of oil, wait until it's really hot then crack the egg in. Fry the egg until it has crispy edges, cooked white and a runny yolk.

Put the egg on top of the fried rice and eat immediately, mashing the crispy yolky egg into the rice. Serve with beer, or regret, or sriracha for extra spice.

Ginseng, Sheffield

Ginseng, recently opened in the West One complex, is Yorkshire's first Korean restaurant (I'd love to be corrected if I'm wrong on this, but I haven't managed to find one up until now). This is a long overdue and rather exciting development, as Korean food is frankly ace.

It's got lots of spice, lots of marinaded meat, the best one-pot rice dish in the world (dolsot bibimbap, which is on the menu here), fantastic sturdy comfort food and lots of pickled vegetables. Kimchi, the ubiquitous Korean fermented cabbagey chilli stuff, is one of my all-time favourite foods. Used as a condiment or a side dish or an appetiser or a beer snack or in whatever way you fancy, it is truly wonderful stuff. Kimchi spam fried rice is a particularly guilty pleasure. I didn't make it up by the way, this is a recognised dish. Google it.

Things got off to a good start at Ginseng with a steady supply of kimchi arriving at the table, along with other banchan (that's the collective word for the little side dishes that form part of any Korean meal) of marinaded beansprouts and pickled daikon. These were free of charge and replaced readily throughout the meal, which is as it should be in a good Korean restaurant.

We chose to eat barbecue as it seemed like a fun option to share between five, but the menu extends to a range of stews, noodle and rice dishes so you could order individually. Before the barbie meats arrived we kicked things off with a kimchi pancake and some pan-fried pork dumplings.

The pancake was a perfect example of the satisfying sturdiness of Korean food. Spicy, salty, beautifully crisp and just a bit greasy. An excellent beer snack. The dumplings were the best I've had in ages, also beautifully crisp with a succulent filling and chewy but pliant casings that reminded me a bit of really good pasta.

Onto the meat. Every table in a Korean barbecue restaurant houses an electric griddle plate for cooking whatever you choose from an extensive list of meat and veg. Not really being experts in this sort of thing we opted for the beef selection and mixed veg selection. Our choice of six varieties of beef included marinaded sirloin and I think topside (bulgogi?), ribeye, boneless rib strips (galbi?), oxtail and some really thinly sliced bits that cooked in seconds.

It was all good stuff, the best for me being the slightly thicker cut rib meat. The marinades were all quite sweet (sugar, soy, sesame oil predominantly at a guess) and gave up just enough juice to flavour the rice alongside a condiment platter of hot chilli bean paste (gochujang, or maybe ssamjang), sesame oil and some red powdery stuff that tasted like tomato cup-a-soup with sesame seeds in it.

I forgot to take a photo of the vegetable platter, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it looked very pretty. It wasn't all so good in the eating though, the obvious candidates for barbecuing with meat soaking up the juices and proving a success (mushrooms, aubergine, courgette) and other things being a bit pointless (sweet and normal potatoes).

We ate rice with our barbecue, but I've since discovered that the way to do it is to order a plate of lettuce and use the leaves to form little wraps (known as ssam) around the meat and sauces. I'll know better next time.

The barbecue could seem a bit gimmicky, but with better menu knowledge than we had you could make it into a very good meal. My tips are go for the beef, add some other meats, remember the lettuce and choose vegetables individually. I'll also definitely be returning to sample some of the non-barbecue dishes.

Service was good throughout our meal, we weren't rushed even though the place was deserted when we left. We did get told off a bit for repeatedly turning our barbecue up too high and causing a smoky nuisance, but we probably deserved that. Sorry guys, it was Friday night and beers were involved.

Including a generous tip we paid £24 each, not bad at all given that we had plenty to drink (a bottle of wine and about seven beers in total). A very welcome addition to the Sheffield restaurant scene.

7/10

West One Plaza
Fitzwilliam Street
Sheffield
S1 4JB