Kimchi

Ahh, kimchi. Or, as my mother likes to call it, electric salad. Spicy, garlicky, pickled vegetable goodness. You might be surprised to learn that this quintessential Korean dish is hugely popular in Japan, and has been firmly absorbed into the local culinary lexicon. You might also be surprised to learn that we make our kimchi, like everything else on the menu at Bincho, from scratch.

There are a thousand kimchi recipes on the internet, each with their own variations and flavours. Our restaurant recipe is top secret, but I can tell you it involves salting raw vegetables (e.g. cucumber or cabbage) and then mixing in liberal quantities of Korean chili flakes, fermented fish tripe and plenty of puréed raw ginger and garlic.

Like a night spent in a strip club in Soho, it sounds incredibly distasteful but is actually brilliant and quite possibly addictive. Oh, and you most certainly need to wear gloves whilst preparing kimchi otherwise your hand will turn bright red. Which is not a good thing when talking about strip clubs.