Bokman, 3 Nine Tree Hill, Cotham, Bristol BS1 3SB. All dishes £8.50-£24, desserts £6.50-£8, wines from £27
Over the years, I’ve learned to love ordering in advance. It wasn’t always this way. For a long time, the point of restaurants for me was spontaneity. At home, you usually know what you’re going to eat hours in advance. It’s a matter of convenience; you buy the ingredients and start preparing. But you can walk into a restaurant not knowing what you’re going to have for dinner. Then you get a list. You choose. They bring it. It’s a miracle. But eventually, I got carried away by the quiet thrill of ordering in advance. There’s still a list. You can still choose. But the delicious anticipation, the thought that something beautiful, tailor-made, is waiting for you in the future, is prolonged.
I first noticed this when I booked a table for Sunday lunch at the Lamplighter Dining Rooms in Windermere nearly a decade ago. It’s not a fancy place. Fancy food makes you roll your eyes. Back then, it looked like your granny’s living room circa 1984, if your granny ran a B&B and regularly fed 50 people for Sunday lunch. The highlight was the roast. I had to place my order for the whole table by 6pm the Friday before. Frankly, it’s a very sweet thought to know that someone who takes care of the basics will prepare your rib roast before the weekend has really begun. Lunch was amazing. I asked. They still do it.
At Bokman, a deliberately noisy Bristol restaurant dedicated to Korean cuisine, you can order a £20 tongdak, or wood-fired chicken, stuffed with sticky rice and served with dipping sauces and pickled radish cubes in the whiteness of murky ice. You have to specify that you want one when you make your reservation. It would be rude not to. It means that, whatever else happens, I will only eat chicken in future. That’s rarely a bad thing. In every other way, Bokman, which opened in late 2019, is completely different to the Lamplighter. The only people who would describe it as comfortable are those who have been on their feet for 12 hours straight and would pay good money to sit down on anything.
A few cafeteria tables are crammed into the tiny space on the ground floor, surrounded by elementary school stools, and a counter with equally ass-demanding bar stools in the window. It’s a room full of elbows and dishes looking over your shoulder and calls of “Should I move this to make some room for you?” On the way to the bathroom, you pass the equally tiny kitchen, and there, to one side, is a sight that inspires joy: the backlit chicken grill, slowly rotating like the best Ferris wheel.
All this suggests a bottom-up affair, but in reality it’s all very top-down. The two chefs, husband and wife team Kyu Jeong Jeon and Duncan Robertson, met at the two-Michelin-starred L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris, where they no doubt slapped lashings of butter into mashed potatoes and dabbled in flawless langoustines. They later led the kitchen of a restaurant in south-west France to a Michelin star, before moving to Jeon’s hometown of Seoul for a couple of years. Eventually they brought their young family here to Bristol, opening on that steep hill just off Stokes Croft with its slew of indie bars, restaurants and cafes where oat milk beats anything from the teat every time, as befits a constituency with a new Green MP.
The menu is a compact and popular selection of their favourite dishes. Tonight there’s a classic dish of soy-braised short ribs, a meatless alternative to tofu with king oyster mushrooms and vegetables, and a sea bass special. We start with a plate of aromatic perilla leaves wrapped around minced beef and pork, then deep-fried in a lacy, fragile batter with a hot, happy crunch. These are heavenly snacks, little pockets of joy that should be eaten as soon as possible from the fryer, which is easy since it’s only about 1.5 metres away. Dip them in the accompanying sweetened soy sauce and mourn them when they’re gone. There’s the hefty Bokman salad, made of layers of Chinese cabbage, toasted pine nuts, heaps of sesame seeds and a healthy ballast of toasted seaweed, which gives the plate a seaside feel. A mini cauldron of fat-grained kimchi fried rice is served with a ruffled-edge fried egg. You can eat this with chunks of fried pork belly – and you know I’ve always intended to.
And then there’s the roast chicken. It’s a small, almost spherical chicken. The skin is dark and salty, blown away from the flesh above the breast. There’s a cut in the middle so you can get to the dense rice filling, which is wrapped around the sweet flesh of pitted dates that have begun to crumble in the heat. For £4.50 you can get a side of crisp lettuce leaves as wraps, so you can eat the chicken ‘ssam’-style with extra seasoning. This includes their own gochujang, the salty, chilli-infused bean paste that takes months of work to make. Making it is a deeply nerdy, single-minded affair, which describes the whole enterprise. The kitchen is laser-focused on those few very good things.
The wine list is short and, this being Bristol in general and Stokes Croft in particular, it’s not particularly overbearing, which means the wine is cloudy, sharp and rarely cheap. Desserts include a matcha tiramisu. But there are also bowls of fluffy vanilla soft serve with various toppings. One is full of “honey butter chips”, similar to giant crunchy nut cornflakes; another has syrup-soaked cherries alongside the quirky sugar-coated gummy cherries that always look like weird testicles to me. If that sounds childish, then guilty as charged. Dessert at Bokman is childish, in all the right grin-inducing ways.
After dinner, take a stroll to the wonderful Bristol-style Turbo Island, which describes itself on its website as an “open-air social gathering place,” a great name for the organic and knowing chaos of the area. Think abandoned sofas, fantastic graffiti art, impromptu bonfires, and no doubt feverish discussions about plans for revolution if everyone feels like it. After planning ahead for a pre-order at Bokman, a random debate with friendly strangers might be just what you need.
Short messages
Gary Usher, of the Elite Bistros group in the North West, has been crowdsourcing again. This time he wasn’t after money – although that will no doubt come – but locations. He announced on social media that he was looking to open a second pub following the success of the White Horse in Churton, Cheshire, which opened last year, and invited people to send him suggestions for pubs ripe for renovation. “Perhaps you know someone who is looking to give up their pub,” he wrote on X. “Perhaps there’s an empty pub in your village.” The next day he said he was being inundated with suggestions. Stay tuned to elitebistros.com for news on the new project.
The Birmingham site, formerly used by chef Brad Carter’s restaurant Carters of Moseley, is set to become what its backers are calling the city’s “first fine-dining Japanese restaurant”. Satori, which they describe as a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment, is being opened by FB Holdings, which already has a number of food and beverage outlets in Birmingham, including Karaage at Resorts World, The Mayan in the Mailbox and Jamaya in Solihull. Visit thesatori.co.uk.
Chef James Rix, who trained under Gary Rhodes and Alastair Little, is celebrating 20 years of Hare and Hounds Hunsdon in Hertfordshire with a series of events. There will be a limited menu for 2004 at £20 for two courses, including French onion soup gratinée and veal liver persillade with a potato cake in duck fat. He will also host a special dinner on October 3 with Saturday Kitchenis Matt Tebbutt, whom he met when they both worked for Alastair Little. foxandhounds-hunsdon.co.uk.
Jay Rayner’s cookbook Nights Out at Home: Recipes and Stories from 25 Years as a Restaurant Critic (£22) is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £19.14.
Email Jay at [email protected] or follow him on X @jayrayner1
