Shilla, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

In the gloop

Review published on 13/05/2009 © Sunday Herald

No Korean meal is complete without that country's challenging speciality, kimchi, or preserved cabbage. At its simplest, soft cabbage (Chinese leaves) is mixed with salt, chilli and garlic, then left to sit in the fridge. Traditionally, it is packed into clay pots and left to ferment, sometimes buried in the ground. One Korean authority describes it as a happy and cheerful food - that's why, when you smile for a photographer in Korea, you say a broad kimchiiiiiiii, not cheese. The very thought of this condiment is meant to put a broad smile on your face.

This was definitely not the reaction of my dining partner when confronted by the kimchi at Shilla, the new Korean restaurant in Edinburgh that comes from the same stable as Kokuryo in Glasgow. Even coaxed with a morsel on a chopstick, he didn't warm to its delights. For my part, I could see its potential. But served fridge-cold in a New Town basement, not downtown Seoul, I'll admit that I ate it more dutifully than enthusiastically.

Shilla is an enigma. When I first ate in Kokuryo in Glasgow shortly after it opened, I was excited by what I took to be a reasonably authentic eating experience.

The second time, I emerged punch-drunk, disappointed by the cooking's crudeness and lack of subtlety . Now, after eating at Shilla, I still can't quite decide if I don't go for Korean cuisine, or if these restaurants just aren't the greatest ambassadors for it.

My main problem wasn't the kimchi - I can see that you could acquire a taste for it, just as you do for olives, or fermented fish sauce.

The food isn't wickedly hot either. What turned me off were the mouth-mugging sauces. Staples in the Korean larder include big personalities like chilli, barley, sesame, soy and yellow bean pastes. That's fine, but what I can't take is when almost everything you order involves a thick, gloopy sauce. My palate felt as if it was under bombardment from salty/vinegary/sweet tastes and gummy/sticky textures. By the time I left I was craving a palate-cleansing lemon sorbet .

We could barely taste grilled scallops because they were masked by a bossy red sauce, the pungency of skewered garlic cloves (halved) and the powerful vinaigrette on an out-of-place European-style side salad.

Glutinous rice cakes (chewy and bland) were submerged in another shiny, shrill red sauce along with slices of full-on sea-flavoured fish cake. Grilled tofu may have been fried and was probably marinated in something strong, tasting not unlike decent chicken. Crimped pastry on gyozo-style dumplings opened up to reveal lean minced pork flecked with greens. Their dipping sauce offered light relief, being thin and sharp, rather than thick and overwhelming.

A generous portion of tender eel looked almost amber, possibly from its embalming in a sweet soy sauce. Even then, its sweetness needed the foil of steamed sticky rice to stop it from being cloying. Had we not already been over-sauced, I would have been more enthusiastic about the clay pot dish of home-made rice noodles (excellent) which came with stir-fried vegetables under an almost jellied layer of smoky-tasting black, glutinous sauce.

Contrast came in the form of a knuckle of pork, cooked in soy sauce and five spice powder, then cooled and sliced. You eat it wrapped in a lettuce leaf, topped with more raw pickles featuring white radish (mooli) and other hard-to-identify grated things with greater or lesser degrees of chilli heat and saltiness, plus thick slices of raw chilli and garlic. This must be the Korean equivalent of our cold cuts and salad.

Perhaps if we had eaten it with a warm broth I would have got through it. As it was, one lettuce parcel was enough. The only Korean-ish dessert - a dollop of bland red bean paste atop a very average vanilla-ish ice cream - is eminently missable.

Shilla's basement premises are difficult and any venture here is unlikely to have the buzz of the cosmopolitan Kokuryo. Perhaps because it is in the capital's moneyed New Town, Shilla's prices are steeper than Kokuryo's too. An interesting experience, but not one I will go out of my way to repeat.