Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants. Today, Jonathan Nunn returns to the review beat! He finds himself taking the temperature of New Malden in the middle of a heatwave and wonders whether one restaurant in particular might herald a brave new era for London’s Koreatown.
Before the review, a reminder that last week we announced our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, a magazine about how the internet and short-form video has reshaped food culture. If you pre-order the issue before 27 July, you will receive it for a discounted price of 10% off, with an 20% discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). You can order your copy here!
We have also now sold out of Ruby Tandoh’s Ice Cream City. If you didn’t manage to get a copy then don’t worry – we are going to do another print run and you can register your interest here.
On a recent, blaringly hot summer’s day, as I was eating pork barbecue, sucking on pieces of collagen while watching a group of Korean men take off their glasses to wipe the sweat off their eyelids, I wondered if I might be sitting in the first great restaurant of New Malden’s new era.
I love New Malden, even though I have sometimes got the feeling that its best times might be behind it. I love that it never quite measures up to what anyone expects a Koreatown to look like. Last month, I went with a Chinese writer for whom the word ‘Koreatown’ conjures the tall buildings, lit up in neon, in Shenyang, or the huge plaza and mini-malls of Shanghai; instead, they were surprised to find that New Malden is full of drab office blocks and red-brick Wetherspoons, with just a thin smattering of Hangul. I love that New Malden might be home to the largest enclave of Koreans in Europe, but it is still clearly English suburbia – no amount of bingsoo cafés can hide that our biggest Koreatown is a high street in Surrey.
Yet, in the last few years, as the Hallyu has swept through London and made Korean culture cool, it’s felt like London needs New Malden less. Korean pochas and dabangs beloved by students are now more likely to open in central London than in the southwest boroughs. A place like Gamnamuzip, a drinking restaurant that serves up huge metal cauldrons of gamjatang and cups of cloudy makgeolli, would have once only thrived in New Malden but is doing even better in Angel. The most interesting restaurants to have emerged from the renewed interest in Korean food have tended to be second-generation-run, serving something slightly askew from traditional Korean food, and not in New Malden – places like Miga in London Fields or Calong in Stoke Newington. Amid this, the high street in New Malden has stayed, more or less, the same – a little unsure of what its role is once you can find Korean food everywhere.
But even the suburbs are gaining suburbs. Walk 15 minutes from the station along Kingston Road, past your Screwfixes and Aldis, and the shops selling camping equipment and Italian scooters, and you will find a new New Malden. There’s Chan Chan Chan, a shop that only sells banchan, the sides that normally come complimentary with any Korean meal, to take home and eat with rice. There’s Cham, which specialises in kimbap, which has a fleeting resemblance to Japanese norimaki, and dosirak lunch boxes. Around the back of an industrial estate, there’s Secret Korean Kitchen, where you can order delicate red tilefish caught off the shores of Jeju. And further on still is a remarkable Korean specialist that points to where New Malden might go next.
