First Look: A One-Man Kitchen in Glebe Is Pumping Out Homestyle Korean Dishes

Three years ago, Kim’s Bop was a travelling market stall. A place for Byungjae Kim to cook jumbo mandu and kimchi perilla noodles swirled with scrambled eggs, to be served to the people by his partner Emily Tarran. Their fans would queue at the Marrickville and Entertainment Quarter markets, and night markets around Sydney. But the couple wanted something permanent, something reliable. And they found it, unexpectedly, in Glebe.

“It’s shocked us in such a good way,” Tarran says. “We didn’t really know Glebe. It’s very community-orientated. Everyone’s very proud, and they want to support the local businesses. Even if they haven’t come in to try our food – we’ve had so many people just pop their head in and say ‘Oh, I’ve seen you’ve just opened, good luck’. We really feel the love.”

Their skinny 16-seat slice of Glebe’s main road is all charm, no-fuss, with arching windows, a tight line of pendant lights down the middle, and open shelves stacked with wine glasses. It’s exactly what they were looking for – minus a bit of kitchen space.

“We found this shop – and it’s really cute,” Kim says. “I wanted to do something here.” It meant scrapping his dreams of Korean noodle soups in favour of a collection of plates more manageable in the one-man kitchen.

The menu starts with guksu (noodles). A tangle of chewy udong noodles, slick with a tangy sauce of blitzed kimchi and perilla seeds, is topped with pickled daikon and thin slices of marinated pork or beef. A rich sesame soup is the creamy base for jjolmyeon (a thinner wheat noodle), with braised tofu and greens, glistening soy-dressed shiitakes and pickled daikon on top.

There are also heaving bibimbap – with pork or miso mushrooms – and generous rice sets. The $12 plates of spicy-sweet tteokbokki are, by any standards, a steal: a generous serve of the chew-tastic rice cakes arrive with a variety of mushrooms (delicate wood ears and whole enokis, when Broadsheet visits), plenty of Kim’s savoury-sweet-spicy sauce, and a crown of roasted sesame and nori. Balance the flavour punch with a $3 serve of seafood broth.

In this little bowl, dried fish, seaweed and veggies fuel a clear broth that’s surprisingly layered. The soup’s flavour is achieved with water that’s never at a full boil, and by paying special attention to the temperature – a technique Kim learnt at cooking school in Tokyo. Instead of all the ingredients being dumped into a pot and simmered together, each hit the water separately, at a specific temperature and for a specific length of time. “It’s a bit of a puzzle to get the balance,” says Tarran.

Vegan kimchi is made in-house – cucumbers and celery are tossed the day before eating, while daikons, cabbages and radishes are prepped a few weeks in advance. Shiitake and kombu add the edge typically gifted by fermented shrimp.

With dishes like this, the couple are challenging common misconceptions about what Korean food is – that it’s exceptionally sweet, heavily fried or extremely meaty. “Sydney’s still getting to know Korean food,” Tarran says. “It’s always Korean barbeque or Korean fried chicken. Travelling in Korea, just the way they prepare vegetables, like, there’s such beauty in that alone – like, that can be your main dish.”

Kim’s homestyle cooking is clean, simple and refined. He’s already using Korean miso – a bold drop that’s saltier, more fermented than its Japanese relative – and he’ll make his own misos and vinegars. Eventually.

The pair are taking it slow, figuring out their flow and refining their offering. But, it’s already excellent, only bolstered further by $3 BYO.

Kim’s Bop
1/325 Glebe Point Road, Glebe

Hours:
Wed to Fri 11.30am–2.30pm, 5.30pm–8.30pm
Sat & Sun 11.30am–3.30pm

@kimsbop