Dongnae, Bristol: ‘A handpicked flurry of Korean loveliness’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

An ornate feast of sweet, sour, sharp, puzzling and powerful

Bristol’s very cool Chandos Road area isn’t by any means a new food-lovers’ hotspot. No, the stoves in this part of town have been bubbling away for decades – once upon a time, Keith Floyd, the original firestarter of the kitchen bad boys, held court on this very road. If you’re a young thing and blissfully unaware of our man Floyd, please avail yourself of the hundreds of YouTube clips out there and count the many moments when his wit, snark and, in many cases, boggle-eyed drunkenness would not be deemed fit in these modern-day puritan times.

Floyd may be long gone, but the 21st-century Chandos Road is home to, among others, the well-loved Little Hollows Pasta Co and the much-lauded farm-to-fork Wilsons, and last autumn they were joined by Korean restuarant Dongnae, from husband-and-wife team Duncan Robertson and Kyu Jeong Jeon. The pair met at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris, moved on to run the now defunct L’Envie in Brive-La-Gaillarde, south-west France, before spending the best part of a decade in Jeon’s native Korea. In 2019, they settled in Bristol to open the very popular Bokman, where dumplings, kimchi fried rice and cherry-flavoured soft-serve Jersey ice-cream are the order of the day.