Bokman, Bristol: ‘Laser-like focus’ – restaurant review

Bokman, 3 Nine Tree Hill, Cotham, Bristol BS1 3SB. All dishes £8.50-£24, desserts £6.50-£8, wines from £27
Over the years, I’ve come to love a pre-order. It wasn’t always the way. For a long time, I considered the whole point of restaurants to be spontaneity. At home you usually know, hours before, what you will be eating. It’s a matter of practicality; of ingredients bought and preparation begun. But you can push into a restaurant without any idea what you’ll be having for dinner. Then you get given a list. You choose. They bring. It’s a miracle. But eventually I got swept up in the calm thrills of ordering in advance. There is still a list. You still get to choose. But the delicious anticipation, the thought that there is a nice, bespoke thing in your future, is extended.
This first struck me when I booked for Sunday lunch at the Lamplighter Dining Rooms in Windermere, almost a decade ago. It’s not a fancy place. It rolls its eyes at fancy. Back then it looked like your nan’s front room circa 1984, if your nan ran a B&B and regularly fed Sunday lunch to 50 people. The key was the roast. I had to get my order in for the whole table by 6pm the Friday before. Honestly, knowing that someone who attends to the essentials is sorting your rib roast before the weekend has really begun is a very sweet thought. That lunch was banging. I’ve checked. They still do this.
At Bokman, a knowingly rackety Bristol restaurant investigating the food of Korea, the pre-order item is a £20 tongdak or wood-fired roast chicken stuffed with sticky rice and served with dipping sauces and cubes of pickled mooli the white of cloudy ice. You have to say you want one when you book. It would seem rude not to. It means that whatever else happens there is roast chicken in my future. This is rarely a bad thing. In all other regards, Bokman, which opened late in 2019, is completely unlike the Lamplighter. The only people who would describe it as comfortable are those who have been on their feet for 12 hours straight and would pay good money to sit down on anything.
There are a few canteen-style tables crammed into the tiny downstairs space, surrounded by primary-school stools, and a counter in the window with equally arse-challenging bar stools. It is a room of elbows and dishes coming over your shoulder and shouts of, “Shall I clear those to make a bit of room for you?” You pass the equally tiny kitchen on the way to the loo and there, to one side, is a sight to inspire happiness: the backlit chicken rotisserie, slowly turning like the very best of Ferris wheels.
All of this suggests a bottom-up affair, but really this is all very much top down. The two chefs, husband and wife Kyu Jeong Jeon and Duncan Robertson, met while at the two Michelin star L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris, doubtless whipping inordinate amounts of butter into mashed potato and doing fiddly things with pristine langoustine. Later, they led the kitchen of a restaurant in southwest France to a Michelin star, before moving for a couple of years to Jeon’s native Seoul. Finally, they brought their young family here to Bristol and opened on this steep hill just off Stokes Croft, with its huddle of indie bars, restaurants and cafés where oat milk wins out over something from a nipple every time, as befits a constituency with a new Green MP.
The menu is a tight and crowd-pleasing selection of their favourite things. Tonight, this includes a classic soy-braised short rib dish, a non-meat alternative of tofu with king oyster mushrooms and greens, and a seabass special. We start with a plate of aromatic perilla leaves, wrapped around minced beef and pork, then deep fried in a lacy, fragile batter of hot, cheery crunch. These are god-tier snacks, little pockets of joy, to be eaten as quickly as possible from the deep fat fryer, which is easy because it’s only about 5ft away over there. Dip them in the accompanying sweetened soy and mourn them when they are gone. There is the sturdy Bokman salad made with layers of Chinese leaf, toasted pine nuts, heaps of sesame seeds and a healthy ballast of toasted seaweed, lending a seashore waft to the plate. A mini cauldron of fat-grained kimchi fried rice comes laid with a frilly-edged fried egg. You can have this with shards of roasted pork belly – and you know I was always going to.
Then there is that roast chicken. It is a small almost spherical bird. The skin is dark and salty, and bubbled away from the meat over the breast. Down the centre is a gash, so you can get at the dense rice stuffing, wrapped around the sweet flesh of stone-in dates that have started to crumble in the heat. For £4.50 you can get a side of crisp lettuce leaves to be used as wraps so you can eat the chicken “ssam” style, with extra condiments. This includes their own gochujang, the salty, chilli-boosted bean paste that requires months of effort to produce. Making it is a profoundly nerdy, determined thing to do, which describes the whole enterprise. The kitchen has a laser-like focus on these few very good things.
The wine list is short and, this being Bristol in general and Stokes Croft in particular, is low intervention, which means cloudy, pungent and rarely cheap. Desserts include a matcha tiramisu. But there are also bowls of fluffy vanilla soft serve with various toppings. One is piled with “honey butter chips”, much like giant Crunchy Nut cornflakes; another has syrup-drenched cherries alongside the whimsy of sugar-crusted gummy cherries, which always look to me like comedy testes. If this sounds childish, guilty as charged. Dessert at Bokman is childish, in all the right grin-inducing ways.
After dinner, take a stroll to the brilliantly Bristolian Turbo Island, which on its website describes itself as “an open-air social hub”, a grand name for the area’s organic and knowing chaos. Think abandoned sofas, fabulous graffiti art, impromptu bonfires and doubtless feverish arguments over plans for the revolution, when everyone can be arsed. After the advanced planning of a pre-order at Bokman, random debate with friendly strangers may just be what you need.
Gary Usher of the northwest’s Elite Bistros group has been crowdsourcing again. This time it wasn’t money he was after – though doubtless that will follow – but locations. He announced on social media that he wanted to open a second pub, following the success of the White Horse in Churton, Cheshire, which opened last year, and invited people to send him suggestions for pubs which were ripe for the treatment. ‘Perhaps you know someone who wants to move on from their pub,’ he wrote on X. ‘Perhaps there’s an empty pub in your village.’ The next day he declared himself inundated with suggestions. Stand by for news of the new venture at elitebistros.com.
The Birmingham site formerly occupied by chef Brad Carter’s restaurant Carters of Moseley is to become what its backers are calling the city’s ‘first Japanese fine-dining restaurant’. Satori, which they describe as a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment, is being opened by FB Holdings, which already has a range of hospitality businesses in Birmingham including Karaage at Resorts World, The Mayan in the Mailbox and Jamaya in Solihull. Visit thesatori.co.uk.
Chef James Rix, who trained with Gary Rhodes and Alastair Little, is celebrating his 20 years running the Fox and Hounds Hunsdon in Hertfordshire with a series of events. There will be a limited-edition 2004 menu at £20 for two courses, which will include French onion soup gratinée and calves’ liver persillade with a duck fat potato cake. On 3 October he’ll also be cooking a special dinner with Saturday Kitchen’s Matt Tebbutt, whom he met when they both worked for Alastair Little. foxandhounds-hunsdon.co.uk.
Jay Rayner’s cookbook, Nights Out at Home: Recipes and Stories from 25 Years as a Restaurant Critic (£22) is available from Guardian Bookshop at £19.14.
Email Jay at [email protected] or follow him on X @jayrayner1