Miga wants you to know its lore. Wander up to the crisp white exterior of this new Korean restaurant, which gleams on a Cambridge Heath corner like an incongruous pair of box-fresh trainers, and you will spot an entire wall given over to a giant text mural.
Detailing the operating family’s multi-generational, 22-year history in the hospitality business — a grandma who trained in Seoul, a mother who started a Covid-era takeaway business in Morden, the father and sons who are behind this new venture — it has the free-associative cheek of an Instagram post — a supremely confident, self-mythologising tale of “peng food” and time-honoured culinary principles that feel, all at once, redolent of both Korean tradition and a decidedly London modern swagger.
In that sense, it is the perfect primer. Miga is both old school and new school; a collision of detonative, masterfully balanced home-style flavours — ringing, richly complex, utterly unlike almost every other Korean in the capital — and a minimalist, contemporary setting.
There is Aesop in the loos, but a collagen salad on the menu and a bowed paterfamilias in the kitchen. The result is a justifiably hyped, word-of-mouth success that honestly may be one of the best places I have eaten at this year. They talk a good game here. But, holy cow, do they back it up and then some.
It took a false start to get to this point. My first attempt to get a walk-in, on a sunny Friday, ended in the sort of friendly but unbudgeable knock back (no, there wasn’t a waiting list) that is honestly quite unusual in this age of sparsely peopled lunch services. Annoying? Yes. But it also, as anyone who has been blown out by someone attractive can attest, only made me want Miga more.
A few days later I was back with a mid-week booking, meeting a couple of friends in the partially glazed white box that forms a small dining room, wafted with the low scent of steamed rice and fringed in rustic wood panelling. There is a long open kitchen on one side, bouncy Korean pop in the background, and the space is run — with straight-backed poise and a fair bit of sass — by a man named Jae, one of the grown-up sons who appear to have spearheaded this rebooting of the Miga brand.
That name, by the way, is the Korean word for beef; a fact heavily hinted by the cow motifs incorporated into the decor and the bovine thrust of the menu. A fried tofu opener was, in this context, joltingly counter-intuitive.
Comprising unusually creamy blocks of bean curd, deep-fried in a lacily crisp, bubbled batter, it was really all about the doenjang sauce: a textured, house-made version of the lively Korean miso equivalent that played a lingering, twanged note of nutty, moreish funk.
Subtle vegetable bibimbap plus hefty king prawns, in a zinging, carmine moat of fresh gochujang, maintained the electric sensation reeling across our palates. But it was the galbijjim (soy-braised short ribs) that ended me.
A monument to patience and skill, they are an abominably flavoursome, all-weather stew of evanescent, slow-cooked vegetables, beef so tremulously tender it slips from the bone with the gentlest spoon-nudge, and leaf salad dressed in a proprietary, hot-sweet gochugaru vinaigrette that’s basically a controlled substance.
“It’s kind of light and heavy at the same time,” said one mate, agog, as we struggled to process it all, between soothing scoops of rice and nibbles of rambunctious house kimchi.
The team at Miga have pooled generational resources to produce a remarkable, soulful restaurant
This point especially applies to the signature seolleongtang, or ox bone broth: an ambrosial, milky brew, cleanly mineral rather than overtly beefy, that’s available either as a suppable capstone to the meal or the base for an enthralling noodle soup, clogged with slices of rare-cooked brisket.
We sipped the last of our chilled tangerine juices (it is currently BYOB) and watched the staff at work. Jae ferried menus to guests; his dad and brother plated up cucumber kimchi and aubergine curry while their sister toiled in the back. Succession planning has always been an issue when it comes to immigrant food businesses. But the team at Miga have pooled generational resources to give their father’s remarkable, soulful cooking the platform it deserves. They are making their own history. And I think they’re going to need a bigger mural.
