For a barbecue joint, the menu is pretty diverse and the hot pot is memorable. Photo: Tenele Conway.
Balconies above, restaurants below – it’s becoming a commonplace setting for some of our city’s best dining and I think we need to coin a new term for this apartment-based food movement.
I’m considering calling it Strata Approved Cuisine, or SAC for short. The terminology might need a little work, and I’m open to suggestions, but more often than not of late I find myself dining in new restaurants located on the ground floor of the towering apartment blocks that are popping up all over our city.
SAC has one defining feature that keeps me coming back again and again, and that’s affordability. My latest affordable SAC outing saw me at a new Korean restaurant with a decidedly odd name, Buttumak The Lid.
Owned by local restaurateur Kwangseo Choi, former owner of Hot Spoon Dickson, I somehow managed to get in the door of this Braddon restaurant before my fellow food writer and self-proclaimed Korean food aficionado Lucy Ridge snavelled the story for herself. I couldn’t be more pleased that I did because it was a meal I have spent the last week thinking about.
While the unusual name of this restaurant had me befuddled for a while, it is likely clearer to the ample Korean clientele who frequent here. A buttumak is a Korean cooking hearth, and the menu is themed around the cast-iron pots called gamasot that sit atop a buttumak. The lid seems to come into the picture as the restaurant serves its barbecue menu laid out on the gamasot lid.
Confused yet? That’s OK – all you really need to know is that the food is good, really good.
Buttumak The Lid is located on Cooyong Street under the apartment towers. Photo: Tenele Conway.
The street front signage advertises this as a Korean barbecue restaurant, but I don’t think that does justice to the diversity of the menu. From plates laden with Korean fried chicken and deep bowls of speciality soups to sizzling platters of spicy meats and bubbling cauldrons of hot pot, the menu is packed with choice.
I couldn’t go past the hot pot menu, which comes with seven choices, including oxtail, spicy seafood, pork backbone and spicy sausage. We landed on the tofu hot pot with pork and it didn’t disappoint.
The dish comes served in a hefty gamasot, which is placed on your personal burner that is found at each table. The thick, rich broth is an exciting lucky dip of tofu, minced pork and an array of mushrooms including wood ear mushrooms, king mushrooms and enoki.
As the dish bubbles down and gets thicker, the flavours could be compared to a bolognaise, if Korea and Italy had a lovechild, that is.
Even more impressive than the meeting of two disparate cultures is the tofu, which is all handmade daily in the Buttumak kitchen, a feat that speaks to the care put into each dish.
I have a personal benchmark that alerts me to when I’m deeply immersed in a memorable meal; it’s when my Garmin watch buzzes on my wrist to tell me my heart rate is high and that I need to calm down. I was only halfway through this meal when the buzz came and I can assure you, I didn’t calm down.
At $72 this hot pot would have served three hungry diners or four people with a standard appetite and with two diners in our party, the team was more than happy to supply a container for leftovers.
If you’re wondering where the banchan is, don’t worry, there is definitely banchan, a whole buffet of banchan to be exact.
The little sides known as banchan are served buffet style. Photo: Tenele Conway.
The little side dishes ubiquitous with Korean dining are nicely lined up in an all-you-can-eat fashion at the front of the restaurant, and not to be outdone by the main meal, these are delightful. The fish cake is sweet and mildly spicy, the eggplant is cooked to perfection in a garlicky sauce, and the kimchi isn’t overly fermented and leans into the sweeter flavours.
If you want to try some SAC dining at Buttumak the Lid, don’t head into Braddon as you know it; they are actually located at the rear of the Canberra Centre and while it’s a stretch to say that a restaurant located on a main road like Cooyong Street could be hidden, it’s a location that may not come to mind when you think of dining out, but I highly recommend the detour.
Buttumak the Lid is located on the Cooyong Street side of the development at 2 Batman Street and is open for lunch and dinner six days a week from Wednesday to Monday.
