Bunsik, Cabot Circus: Are we making food to fill people, or for people to fill their feed?

Patience is a virtue, not a corndog

London’s Borough Market is cracking down on influencers filming without permits, with several ‘reviewers’ having been kicked out mid-shoot in recent weeks. This is music to my ears — viral videos on social media create hype that leads to completely undeserving places being packed, while good restaurants with smaller marketing budgets fall by the wayside. Such fanfare is based on whether something looks good or whether the restaurant can afford to give away food to influencers for free. Hype and taste are almost mutually exclusive. This phenomenon is what has led to enormous queues at Bunsik. Though I suspect it will be a while before any crackdown on influencers at this particular Circus…

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I once stood in line for eight hours to meet Jane McDonald — so don’t call me impatient.

I grew up in the time of waiting. Waiting hours with my dad to do the banking on a Saturday. Waiting for the earth to complete at least one full orbit around the sun before a ‘new’ film made it to video, and then a further ten minutes for the VHS player to rewind it because the previous bastard renters had committed the ultimate cardinal sin and not bothered.

Waiting… Half days for computer games to load that ended up crashing and later, for the internet to dial up a connection — screaming like a cage of wounded birds being dropped from a motorway bridge as it did so (if you don’t believe me, listen).

Scientists have even greased their toolkits suggesting that when it comes to queuing, we’re all behaviourally stunted by the ‘power of six’: if it’s longer than six minutes, six people or offers us less than six inches of wriggle room apart — we ain’t doing it mate.

So, when my first attempt to eat at Bunsik presents me with over an hour wait time to even reach the shiny kiosk ordering screens, I gratefully decline.

I give it a week. A week to let the dust settle on the yellow and blue balloon arch behind which the very first franchise of the UK’s No.1 Korean Street Food brand has recently opened to much hype in Cabot Circus. Looking like IKEA for the K-pop generation, Bunsik promises catchy riffs on Korean classics — this is more than food for flavours sake, it’s reel food: cheese pulling moments captured in a bright neon playground, it stares back at you all glossy and polished, the hard glitter of a beanie baby’s glare.

You ain’t nothing but a corndog

This time, thankfully, it’s straight down to business and ordering is a quick and easy to navigate process of a menu comprising nine subsections including drinks and sides.

Our plastic tray arrives with the same swiftness, and I carry it back to the table with genuine intrigue. Aside from the Korean fried chicken bites (£6.40), the novel selection of dishes range in every shade of brown that it’s enough to give Dorothy’s Kansas a run for its money — oh the wonders of cooked flour.

I’ll be sticking to the original KFC

While my teenage daughter focused on the KFC, I got to grips with two Korean corn dogs. The first is the original (£4.40) – a chicken sausage, soft and smoky, and pleasingly dredged in a sweet and salty panko crumb, the baking powder providing another layer of textural padding, light and fluffy like a Parka’s hood.

The second is the potato and mozzarella (£6.50), the cheese-stringy TikTok stick that the brand itself is pedalling as its social media frontman. On the first bite it reminded me of the little cheap donuts they make in front of you at the funfair, tasting solely of sugar and fryer oil, but without the allure of a go on the dodgems.

Say cheese

I remained hopeful for the tteokbokki (£6.90), a lunchbox of tubular rice cakes submerged in a thick and spicy gochujang sauce. Working my way through it was laborious, the chewy gnocchi-esque cylinders and the unrelenting sauce both homogeneous. It didn’t start, or go, anywhere pleasant.

The same could be said for the chicken bites, which my daughter left, enough for me to know that the hot and sticky soy glaze was another cul-de-sac that demanded something to take us both away in another direction — mainly, towards the door.

There was no Jane McDonald at the end of that eight-hour line. It was all a ruse, a cruel star-spangled carrot that kept us all shunting forward. I felt the same about Bunsik: if you create enough noise about the experience on offer, then the actual taste doesn’t matter, right?

I left feeling as confused as Dorothy must have felt on arriving in Oz — you never escaped the drab cabin walls, but everything around you was technicolor.

All words and photos by Roo Winks

Bunsik, Unit SU52, Cabot Circus, BS1 3BD

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