Dongnae, Bristol: ‘Casual about its excellence’

For all Bristol’s food credentials, for all the locally sourced ingredients, its finicky and gorgeous small plates, its homemade shrubs and pickles and fermented everythings, for the outrageous number of bakeries that see me become a walking pastry every time I nip in to the centre, I have some issues with the city’s restaurant culture.

Mostly that it is not a spontaneous place. You need to be organised if you’re going to eat well. I’ll spare you the gory details of a reservation-free Sunday afternoon two years ago, other than to say that there was much walking up and down hills in the rain, and we were practically laughed out of a pub serving a famous roast dinner (no walk-ins, as it happens, no; I checked again recently and it has sold out of roasts for the rest of 2026). It ended with the surreal hostility of a desolate Pieminister, where staff kept saying it was full when there was absolutely nobody in there. I insisted on sitting down, then ordered the most spiteful pie of my life.

Lesson learned, I booked an early Saturday lunch at Dongnae, in Redland, which opened in September 2024 and is the sister restaurant to the popular (but temporarily out of action) canteen-style Bokman, in Stokes Croft. It comes from husband-and-wife chefs Duncan Robertson and Kyu Jeon, who met while working in Michelin-starred establishments in France, and then moved to Jeon’s native Seoul for a few years before returning to the UK. Over the past 18 months their reputation for exquisite Korean food has grown and grown, so Dongnae was a bit of a pilgrimage. My partner Liz and I had travelled to Bristol the night before for a gig, and we were trying to stretch out an indulgent weekend. We were also mildly, scruffily hungover, and hungry with it. To get back into the swing of things, I had a glass of Le Jeau, a chilled Loire red. As this is Bristol, the wine list is low-intervention, a principle I respect, though I do prefer my wine to have had an intervention staged, preferably a large one.

Plenty has been written about Britain’s K-food explosion, but for many, Korean food may be broadly unfamiliar still. I first had it years ago, in Staines, with the rock band Hard-Fi – the indie sleaze memoir writes itself – and we all discovered that barbecuing meat while attempting to do an interview is not necessarily the best idea an editor has ever had. Since then, my exposure has been limited to experiments in supermarket-bought kimchi and bastardised homemade bibimbap. Both are good for hangovers, incidentally, though nowhere near as effective as the soothing warmth of Dongnae’s mushroom sotbap: short-grain rice in a sizzling pot. If I preferred the rice cooked with wagyu beef fat, they could do that, they said, with nonchalance. It arrived on the table ready to be slopped with a chilli-spiked perilla seed oil, which we mixed through with the egg yolk on top. The nuttiness, with the heat and the richness of the sauces, turned those mushrooms and rice into something holy. We scraped away at the bottom of the pot with a spoon, diving for restorative chunks of crisp-edged rice.

Eating at Dongnae feels like a discovery. It means “neighbourhood” in Korean, and while this isn’t priced to make it a regular haunt for most, it is casual about its excellence, as unstuffy as its name suggests. Maybe it was the unhurried weekend lunchtime vibes – it was packed throughout our two-hour-plus sitting – or maybe it was the low-key ease of the room, the crisp tiles and the vast glass frontage reminders of its past as a butcher’s shop. It presented itself like a plain white T-shirt on a supermodel. Everything about it shrugged: yeah, I know.

The staff at Dongnae are patient with any and all questions, and I had a lot of them. Primarily: “Are you sure this isn’t too much?” No, they said, fairly, without any sense of an impending upsell: two or three small plates, something from the grill, which hits you with a smoky waft of barbecue as soon as you walk in, maybe some rice, and go to town on the extras. By the end, the small table was so full of scraped clean plates that it should have been ashamed of itself.

The tuna belly hand roll was delicate with wasabi, which I thought I hated, though it turns out I just hate the nuclear green splodge from a small plastic sachet. It introduced a swaggering warmth that spread lazily, then blossomed suddenly, a journey of flavour that was repeated throughout the meal. The tuna jumeokbap – rice balls wrapped in a feathery seaweed – were topped with confit tuna and fresh truffle, which made me think I should reconsider truffle mayo. They were topped with tiny chunks of expertly pickled chilli to cut through the fattiness, and the whole thing was wonderful. Mylor prawns were tempura’d, to be eaten whole, eyeballs, legs and all, and were a savoury tonic. The server warned us that they might tickle our throats. They did, Liz confirmed – spindly shellfish limbs sticking out of her mouth – tickle just a bit.

The grill is meat-heavy, as is often the way: pork, quail and wagyu loin all given time over fire. We had the Cornish red mullet, salt-cured and grilled. The skin was crisp, the flesh silky. Dipped in the accompanying gochujang, it was salty, sweet and hot. The grill more than pulled its weight on the plants, too. Early-season Wye Valley asparagus – so early that it was punchy, price-wise, though worth it – was barbecued and rested on a bed of obscenely yellow yuzu hollandaise, salty trout roe piled on top. It was my first asparagus of the year and a sunny reminder that spring is on its way.

The unassuming-sounding trio banchan (vegetables eaten alongside the mains) gave everything a lift. Slices of courgette had been gently stir-fried with garlic and shrimp paste and piled up next to a twirl of white kimchi and a stack of mooli noodles, rich with the fragrant nuttiness of perilla seeds. A veggie doenjang jjigae (soybean stew), made with the chefs’ own years-old fermented soybean paste, was meaty and savoury, like oxtail soup.

Carbs, salt and the cool-air nourishment of fresh fish and veg: all wonderfully healing for a fuzzy Saturday afternoon. The table had all but breathed a sigh of relief once the mountain of dishes had been cleared. We ordered the pudding – there is only one – to share. Injeolmi (chewy little rice cube), came with a delicately whipped vanilla cream and jocheong (a hefty, caramel-like rice syrup), rippled with a splash of aged soy sauce. It’s a flex, isn’t it, to do just one dessert – to end a meal with a lack of choice. Take it, or leave it, this is what they do. Dongnae justifies that confidence, and then some. Because, well, obviously: yeah, they know.

Dongnae, 5-7 Chandos Road, Redland, Bristol BS6 6PG (dongnae.co.uk). Small plates £6.50-£19, mains £18-£50, dessert £8, wines from £33