Dongnae, Chandos Road: 'The best new Bristol restaurant of 2024'
Embrace religion à la Russel Brand and baptise yourself in a river of ganjang.
“It’s like Bokman, but they’ve taken four lines of coke instead of two”. That was the comment from a patron at Dongnae on a recent Friday evening, having just eaten a £12 sea urchin with his raw aged beef sirloin. While I won’t publicly advocate for the use of illicit drugs, he’s got the sentiment spot on: the latest addition to Chandos Road has taken one of Bristol’s best restaurants and put it on steroids.
In just seven short days Dongnae has proven itself a Class A addition to Chandos Road; a stretch in Redland that has for over fifty years been home to some of Bristol’s best restaurants.
In the 70s and 80s there was Keith Floyd’s restaurant, which went on to become No Man’s Grace, where people can now be found sipping negronis or house rosé in Snobby’s. There was Culinaria, just left of where Dongnae is now. There was Michelin-starred Wilks which upped sticks to Bath during Covid.
There still remains Bristol’s best restaurant Wilsons and its rather excellent neighbour Little Hollows. Chandos Road is not becoming a ‘foodie hotspot’ - it has been one for half a century. Dongnae will be right at home.
Most people in the UK can count the number of times they’ve had Korean barbecue on one hand. You’d be able to count the number of times you’ve had Korean barbecue as good as this on one finger. The grill is the pulsing heart of Dongnae.
Whereas husband and wife team Duncan and Kyu’s other restaurant, Bokman, is renowned for its rotisserie stuffed chicken, it is tales of so-crisp-it-curls pork skin (£16) and thin slithers of Goldilocks-worthy Eonyang bulgogi ((£18) beef, for those of you that aren’t familiar) that will ricochet across the country spreading the word of Dongnae.
Punters will travel from far and wide to eat here. They’ll be welcomed by five small bowls of banchan; baechu kimchi (£2.5), mustard leaf kimchi (£3), seasoned miyeok seaweed (£2.5) and nabak kimchi in a spicy kimchi water (£3).
All are unique and delectable but it is the fifth, the jang jorim (£4.5), which anyone that eats meat should double, maybe even triple, up on. Strings of tender beef in a soy sauce marinade so rich you will beg the staff to tell you where they buy their ingredients (Wai Yee Hong, apparently) and topped with delicate little marinated quail’s eggs.
There was, for a brief moment, a thought that we should take my dad and brother to Dongnae when they visit next week. It would have been hugely entertaining to watch them try and make sense of tteok galbi, muchim, naengchae and perilla. Their eyebrows would have descended further and further down their faces until they gave up and let me order for the table. Most other family members have already conceded.
But you need not worry about the slightly esoteric nature of the menu. You could order completely blindly at Dongnae and the results would still be spectacular. Salted jellyfish naengchae with hot mustard (£6.8) was an inspired apple, jellyfish and crab taco sat in properly nose-tickling mustard.
Raw aged beef sirloin with pine nuts and Korean pear (£8.5) was a rather more sophisticated Korean answer to hoisin duck pancakes; noodles of raw beef to wrap in nori sheets with sweet batons of pear and cucumber. I loved it.
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Both pork and beef from the grill come with ssam and condiments - read salad and sauces - in which to envelop morsels of meat. It’s fun, plucking pickled chillis and swipes of fermented prawn with chopsticks to layer into a leaf with your pork jowl. Plant-based eaters can enjoy Dongnae branded grilled mushrooms (£18).
The result is finger food sent straight from the hands of the gods. It’s an invitation to come and worship at the altar of the Dongnae grill, night after night, never once becoming jaded because the flavours are just so spectacular. Embrace religion à la Russel Brand, who was also previously a fan of Class A drugs, and baptise yourself in a river of ganjang (much better than the Thames in which old Russel was born again).
It happens once in a blue moon these days which makes it even more special - I can honestly tell you I’ve never had anything like it. And as Brand said about his first month as a Christian, “it’s beautiful”.
The only criticisms we can make would, in most other restaurants, still be considered triumphs.
Korean fried chicken wings (£7.5) were just not quite as magical as the ones at Bokman and shed their batter a little too easily. And the clam and mussel bibimbap (£10.5) was lacking entirely the crisp nurungji - the Korean equivalent of socarrat or tahdig - that usually has you picking the edge of the bowl clean, though the flavour in the rice from the seafood was still ambrosial. It’s just more like a good risotto and less like the bibimbaps I’ve come to love.
We arrived, in a state of blissful contentedness, at an entirely sequitur conclusion in the form of delica squash and black sesame injeolmi on a chestnut cream (£4.5).
The savouriness of the squash is incredibly subtle but by no means to the detriment of the dish which was a textural masterpiece and consumed in less than the time it takes you to google injeolmi. I’ll save you the bother - it’s a Korean rice cake made from pounding glutinous rice flour, not dissimilar to the Japanese mochi.
And just like that it was over. Even at 10pm there were hopefuls still trying for a table.
Now for my mystic Meg moment. Dongnae will get picked up by a national newspaper soon and it’ll snowball from there. My money is on William Sitwell first followed by Tom PB. It’ll be in the Michelin guide within three months, and rightly so. Will it get a star? I wouldn’t rule it out.
Before we left I passed Duncan, who was managing the pass with a slightly stern look about him, as I went to the loo. “Sorry I haven’t been able to chat”, he said. “It’s a bit stressful”.
I’ve never opened a restaurant myself, but I can imagine it is an enormous amount of pressure being behind the best new Bristol restaurant of 2024. Despite the stress and the pressure, they’ve managed to make Dongnae fun, seemingly without even having to resort to taking Class A drugs. All power to them.
All words and photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Dongnae, 5-7 Chandos Rd, BS6 6PG
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Wilsons, Chandos Road: 'It is the best restaurant in Bristol, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong'
Putting restaurants into local and national context can be helpful. It helps readers assess whether or not to visit, whether it is worth their money, whether they will like the food. Or it just provides interesting background information to those who have no intention of ever stepping foot through the door.
Thanks Meg, what a great read. As a food writer who has only been in Bristol for about a month, I appreciated your details, awesome x
Lovely writing. It makes me want to dust off my passport and head back to Bristol!