On a wall of Yeodongsik is a framed board with 11 dishes, printed in Korean – this is the restaurant’s entire menu. It’s written in Korean because, for most of the restaurant’s short life, the diners have been the same Korean customers who ordered deliveries of haejang-guk (which loosely translates to “hangover soup”, although it is not eaten just for its morning-after-curing properties) during lockdown from owner Justin Shin’s Instagram account. Yeodongsik in Lidcombe in Sydney’s west, is Shin’s first restaurant.
Yeodongsik’s brief menu isn’t the norm. In Sydney, it is common for Korean restaurants (and migrant-run restaurants generally) to have long menus that cater to a community with many requests, and a broader audience who might not be familiar with the cuisine.
Yeodongsik’s menu shows the growth of Sydney’s Korean community – there are now enough people, and interest in the cuisine, to sustain specialist restaurants.
Its haejang-guk fit into the gukbap category of Korean cuisine – lightly seasoned bone-based soups, served with rice. While many Sydney Korean restaurants are liberal with sauce and salt, the simplicity and restraint here is part of the restaurant’s popularity. “In Korea, they don’t season the soups, you do it yourself because everyone has a different taste. We want to serve food like they do in Korea,” says Shin.
That’s not to say they’re bland. If they were, there wouldn’t be a queue outside, despite the 20 or so other Korean food options in the suburb. And with only 25 seats, the restaurant fills quickly. (For a guaranteed seat with low risk of menu items selling out, get there at 5pm on the dot.)
With a base of just water and bones – mainly beef, sometimes with pork added later – the haejang-guk are simmered for hours to give a complex flavour. The ppyeodagwi-haejangguk (with pork bones and shredded cabbage) and dwaeji-gukbap (with pork-blood jelly, ears and maw), for example, have a silky quality and slightly milky appearance. The do it-yourself seasoning comes in the form of saeu-jeot (salted and fermented shrimp) for depth, perilla seed powder for earthiness and dadaegi (chilli garlic paste) for heat. “I tell my staff if a foreigner comes in, explain how to season each soup,” says Shin. The other condiment is rice – it’s served as a side but you’ll see other diners add all or part of their rice into their soup.
The outliers to these subtle styles of soup are the yukgaejang, a slightly spicy beef and leek soup; and kongnamul-haejangguk, a hangover soup from Jeonju – a city in western South Korea – made from a base of dried anchovies and squid, with a tangle of bean sprouts and egg.
There are some shared dishes too – jiggly slices of boiled pork belly with sundae (blood sausage), and a crunchy-yet-soft prawn and chive pancake.
Despite the restaurant’s name roughly meaning “sharing food together in the one place”, this isn’t a spot for celebratory or soju-powered group dining. The complimentary beverage is barley tea, the music is soft jazz, and staff speak to diners in the tones of a flight attendant explaining a late-night meal.
It’s the kind of restaurant where you could have a meal without saying a single word, yet leave feeling completely relaxed and satisfied. It is unusually peaceful – refined, understated, just like a bowl of haejang-guk.
Yeodongsik, Shop 7, 36/44 John St, Lidcombe, NSW 2141, jkbc.com.au
