You-Me

There's an air of the curiosity shop about this small family-run café - it must be the quaint pink tablecloths, the haphazard service (charming, nonetheless, and multilingual in Korean, Chinese and Japanese) and the slightly cramped interior. Heavy leather-bound menus found their way to our table soon after we were seated: useful tomes, filled with colour pictures of every dish. Pictures do lie, however: we were pleasantly surprised by the generous serving of cold chewy glass noodles with mixed shredded vegetables, wood-ear fungus and prawns. Likewise, a plate of chapch'ae was a heaped portion, served alongside rice. The dishes satisfied in volume, but the cold noodles needed a substantial squeeze of mustard sauce to pep it up, while the chapch'ae was slightly too greasy. Oxtail meat soup had its faults too, with rather bland thin stock and dry meat. We might have done better to order the Korean-Chinese dishes that seemed to dominate the menu, and the tables of other diners, such as ja jang myun (noodles topped with a sauce of soy-bean paste, diced meat and vegetables) or the steamed dumplings, to accompany the pots of complimentary barley tea.