Oriental Spoon

Located at the heart of Melbourne CBD this Korean restaurant is a nice little hot spot for reasonably priced tasty Korean food. Walking past it you will immediately notice the classy look to the restaurant front and the neatly designed floor plan and well presented staff. It had been a long day and we were craving for something different, warm, tasty and containing a good amount of vegetables. No one had any objections to Korean food, so in we went…

My friends and I decided to share the dishes and started off by ordering a selection of entrees.

Kimchi jeon (pancake)

Takoyaki (octopus pieces in a ball of doughy goodness)

Mushroom salad with garlic dressing

The entree dishes were quite nice particularly the mushroom salad. Flavour wasn’t overpowering and was nice and refreshing. The kimchi jeon was something new for me and I was expecting it to be spicy but it wasn’t at all so that was a pleasant surprise. Maybe not for others who prefer it to be hotter. Takoyaki balls aren’t essentially Korean cuisine (more Japanese) but my friends haven’t had it before, and it’s well just one of my favourite foods. I loved it either way.

Side dishes: Kimchi, pickled radish and bean sprouts.

Basic side dish selection. I was expecting six though like the candied potatoes/sweet potatoes, fish cake and young spring onions, but each Korean restaurant has their own side dishes they serve I suppose. Kimchi was not as spicy as I remember it normally and this might be because my taste buds have evolved. The pickled radish was good, not spicy at all and bean sprouts were nice as well.

Ddukbokki (On noodles, cabbage and fish cake served with half a boiled egg and deep fried wonton). Spice: mild-moderate

I enjoyed this dish. It was tasty and a little spicy. The noodles underneath were a surprise but the dish didn’t need the extra deep friend wonton on top, or the one half boiled egg. Quite unnecessary really. It almost ruined the dish but oveall it was a nicely balanced ddukbokki plate that wasn’t overwhelmed with rice cakes so that was good. One critique would be there there seemed to be a lack of sauce? Or maybe it was just me.

Dduk Galbi on a bed of sizzling vegetables.

Dduk Galbi is essentially a Korean beef patty. This was served with a bit of mustard of some sort. Inside these two in particular was a piece of rice cake (the one used for cooking Ddukbokki). I almost thought it was a block of cheese at the start. The dish tasted like, well beef patties with slightly different seasoning to your normal American burgers. The vegetables underneath were there to balance the dish out. Beef patties are robably not something I would eat at a Korean restaurant though. It’s how I probably wouldn’t want to eat potato croquettes a Japanese restaurant. It’s very well ordinary.

Chicken Bibimbap served in a stone bowl.

There was actually an option to have this served in a normal bowl which I couldn’t figure out why until I started eating from it. Having it served in a heated stone bowl allows the bibimba to continue the cooking process. Even though most of the time, the bowls are brushed with oil to prevent the rice from sticking, after mixing, that oil layer is gone and so what you get is rice getting stuck onto the bowl and forming that sort of somewhat burnt and hardened ‘fried’ rice. The variety of components that came with the dish was good whereas I’ve had bibimbap where there didn’t seem to be enough elements in the bowl. The bibimbap tasted nice, like how it usually does. It’s something that wouldn’t blow your mind though.

We also ordered Japchae which I didn’t get to take a separate picture of. But here is picture of half of the table spread (with Japchae in it). The noodles stuck together almost like glue but the flavour incorporated in the noodles was much nicer than the bibimbap. Even though there wasn’t much to it, it tasted really good. There were five of us in total, but one friend was sick so she had her own dish. So basically we shared all this food between the four of us. It was very challenging, but we took it slowly and steadily and before you know it, we managed to finish nearly all of it. It did help that the food was quite tasty in general. It’s like Korean comfort food that will satisfy your food cravings on a cold and wet winter day. And there were plenty of vegetables so I was very happy customer.