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Sadly, there are so very few occasions when a visit to a restaurant envelopes your senses in a perfume of contentment and delight that the scents actually cling to you long after you have departed. Of course, we can make an exception to a chilli mud crab or a platter of oysters that dominate the upper echelon of restaurants (and refuses to depart their scent from your fingertips no matter how many times you scrub), but what about everyday eats in the Downtown region of your city?
As working hours become longer and cooking at home seems a less desirable option, it’s becoming increasingly commonplace to substitute the home-cooked meal at the dinner table to be replaced with quickly prepared and filling servings from a local outlet. Unfortunately, due to this excessive demand by many busy workers, somewhere along the time reel that yielded many talented and original artists of the pan, restaurants of a regular influx of customers perhaps decided that they should lower their standards and start offering substandard flair and passion to their customers — your meal is finished and the aroma of the cooking departs from your senses soon after.
But before we raise our voices against the failing standards of restaurant service and food (which is not the focus or the opinion of this post or its writer), it’s important to be mindful of operational and food costs, wages and the high levels of stress that inevitably arrive with a variety of customers who step through the door. Running a restaurant in any place or under any circumstance is never an easy thing, but thankfully there are still a variety of quality restaurants who boast the freshness and passion of their chefs that is continuously embedded in their products — and thankfully again, great street eats are much easier to find than you might think and are not going to cost you an arm or even a leg.
One such restaurant opened my eyes (and made them water soon after: was it the onions or the chilli, perhaps) and tantalised my nose and ears (both of which also became saturated with stimulation) to a fresh concept in my mind. Bassim Korean Barbeque in Sydney’s inner-western suburb of Strathfield is one such exemplar of consistency in quality, excellence in service and value in portions serving and most importantly, a healthy and colourful variety of options to suit all tastes.
Let’s face it: nobody wants to walk out of an expensive restaurant with breath as sulfurous as a dragon after its meal of butter-garlic escargot. Yet it is of my humble opinion that unless you leave the dinner table smelling to high heaven of the meal that you just devoured, the meal was generally unsatisfying. To this day, my knuckles are red-raw from the hypothetical slaps they would have received if I forgot or refused to give compliments to the chef, my grandmother, for her mastery of the culinary arts (and goodness knows that grandmothers everywhere deserve all the praise in the world for their amazing repetoire of recipes and techniques for cooking they’ll never share with you!).
It is my understanding that you can cause great offence to the chef of a noodle bar in Japan if you fail to slurp your noodles (as a sign of enjoyment), cause offence again if you don’t burp following your meal (in some parts of the Middle-East), have a siesta following your several lunchtime courses (much of Eastern Europe) and even stir up a fuss if you leave slight amounts of food scraps on your plate.
So back to the excitement at hand, what is it that makes Bassim so worthy of this post?
Bassim presents to the footpaths with a quiet and unassuming exterior of inward-facing glazed glass panels, pasted with playful decals in a handwriting style of font. These haphazardly placed letters and phrases of their signature dishes are jumbled into a mesh of English words and Korean characters: a fascinating hybrid conjunction to a clearly modern appeal of its decor blending with its steadfast practices in the kitchen. We enter through the double-glass doors, greeted like minor celebrities and given the request of seating - we could enjoy the ambience of the al fresco aspect, where our food would be complimented by the traffic of feet and wheels and neon, or taking a seat amongst the evident locals of the restaurant. Clearly seen from our first visit, Bassim is a restaurant that has a large turnover and an even larger turnover of revisits, craving the novelty and innovation of its providing.
Our first choice was seating: inside or out. Given our return visits on three occasions, we chose the indoor at first and the outdoor later. The indoor experience was of great interest to me given how unconventional it appeared to be. Great circular tables struggled to fit all of the chairs underneath it without minor crowding, though this was the least of our worries. A heavy cast iron brazier dominated the centre of each table, filled on frequent intervals by the waiter with tender young lickings of charcoal that is prepared close by, on site. It is a wonderfully warming aspect on a winter’s night and gives off a comforting glow for me, while the others impatiently decide on the best choice to sate them. But the most important feature of the inside of the restaurant has been glossed over already: it was very, very smokey.
Bassim thrilled us with the delicious warm scents of freshly cooking meats upon their grill but caused us to whimper and cringe at the thickness of smoke that kept in our clothes even after several washes. This was our first good omen of the great food to come and luckily, we were not disappointed. I ordered the trimmed chicken breast, a slender piece of pinkish meat that had been marinated in a fragrant sesame seed oil base, complimented with a dash of garlic, salt and soy sauce. The others ordered a variety of lean meats, raging from very finely sliced pork patties, uncooked tiger prawns and a small piece of seasoned rump steak. Let alone the kimchi and pickled onions which barely lasted the first five minutes of sitting down.
Before we could take the time to admire how wonderfully presented all of our food was, the cooking had already started. I couldn’t resist the urge to grab the scissors as soon as I could and release those primal instincts in me to carve and cook and serve the freshest catch of the day, over a gently stirring charcoal fire that crispened and flavoured the ingredients superbly. Who said anything about communal eating? I became the self-nominated chief of cooking for the table.
At roughly $9 a plate, there’s definitely very little to complain about and given how attentive the staff were to our needs, we could almost go as far as to say that it was well-worth the journey out to the Downtown and an experience to be repeated again and again. Although our inexperience to the customs of Korean barbeque cost us a host of embarrasments due to our unfamiliarity (such as the slippery steel chopsticks and steel bowls for cooked red rice), it didn’t take long for the other regular customers to make us feel a little more at home… by no longer staring at our fumbling mistakes!
Make this visit one high on the list of priorities to visit in a trek to Sydney.
Bassim Korean Barbeque
Shop 252, 20-34 Albert St
Phone (02) 8756 5689
Posted 1 month, 28 days ago. in Recipes.
I totally agree, I myself look at peoples plates to see if they finish when it comes back to the kitchen, if they go back for seconds that is a true compliment (at home though) -E