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It’s a long way from chef Joo Won’s previous job to his new restaurant in north London’s Stoke Newington. Horizontally, it’s at least 45 minutes by Uber. Vertically, it’s 28 storeys or 100 metres down. Culturally? Oh boy. That will take some unpacking. For seven years, Won was head chef of Galvin at Windows, perched atop the Hilton Park Lane, a blunt 1960s tower which looks like a car park, only without the grace notes. The restaurant did lovely, polished versions of the jus-drenched French bistro repertoire for which the Galvins had become famous elsewhere at street level.
It was the sort of place that housed a cook retained to make a Béarnaise sauce fit for the gods to accompany the chateaubriand and asparagus that they sold in volume. That chap had completely nailed the emulsifying froth and whip. They might serve a version of tournedos Rossini with a Mont Blanc to finish. That was Korean-born Won’s beat. The restaurant’s French accent was bolstered by the twinkly, impeccably Gallic presence front-of-house of Fred Sirieix, the closest thing to a celebrity maître d’ London had until he packed it in to just be a celebrity, trying to help strangers cop off with each other on TV dating shows. The view from up there was heroic. It included what they claimed was the only public peek into the monarch’s back garden at Buckingham Palace. (It’s quite big.)
Last spring, after 18 years, the Galvins closed the restaurant. It will shortly be replaced by the latest outpost of an international brand called Shanghai Me, which apparently offers “a modern interpretation of Pan-Asian cuisine”. In Dubai that includes a dish called Evgeny’s Wagyu Beef Sub, which, to be fair, does sound like the culinary zeitgeist on a plate. Meanwhile, following a transformative trip back to Korea, Won has opened Calong, which means “hip” or “cool” in a local dialect of Busan, Won’s hometown. Fair enough. The small restaurant dining room presents very much as a hip, cool 2025 small plates bistro; the sort Stoke Newington’s residents might assume had always been there. The changing menu is on a blackboard, which you will be encouraged to get up and photograph to take back to your friends at the table. The short, almost entirely European wine list has a section headed “skin contact” and costs a little more than you were hoping to spend compared to the price of the food. There’s no view of the Buckingham Palace gardens. Instead there’s a Whole Foods across the road, and a dry cleaners next door.
But the properly cool thing here is the food, which is cool in an understated way, and that’s the best kind of cool. It’s not about whipped cod’s roe with radishes, four salted anchovies on a plate and something listed on the menu only as “goat, pumpkin, liminal spices”. Won’s cooking is fluent Korean. Gochujang is involved, along with sweetened soy. There is ginger. There are finely sliced spring onions. But there is a French twang, like he’s been loitering in the Marais for a very long time.
A classic pajeon, or spring onion pancake, is the expected lacy, friable golden disc covering the plate from rim to rim. But placed on top is both a sesame oil-dressed rocket salad and an artfully spooned quenelle of a whipped fennel purée, which could have wandered in from an Alain Ducasse bistro. It’s so velvety and smooth it could sit on the dressing table as a restorative overnight face cream. It feels less like an interloper, and more of a considered addition.
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Anyone with experience of Korean food will know it often comes with admin, for which, stoically, you must be prepared. There are tabletop barbecues that you must tend yourself, while muttering quietly under your breath about the indignity of paying to cook the food yourself. There are dishes served ssam style, a challenge of lettuce wrapping and condiment application. To be fair, I’ve come to love this stuff. It’s engrossing. Calong, however, is Korean food without the admin. Korean fried chicken is usually a messy business. If you don’t find a generous dab of sweet chilli sauce behind both ears at night’s end you haven’t done it properly. Here, perfectly fried bird, with a golden, creviced overcoat, arrives on a thick puddle of sweetened gochujang, so you can be delicate and use a knife and fork to cut and then dredge, without pausing for breath while giving your disappointed assessment of the latest Bong Joon Ho movie. Some might see this as an ersatz of Korean fried chicken, but it plays as more delicate and accommodating than that.
A crisp-skinned piece of hake arrives on a rust-coloured stew of daikon and potatoes. It looks like a dish served up at your favourite fish restaurant in Cannes; something you might eat while speculating over who owns the impossibly garish private yachts bobbing out on the waters in front of you. But the flavours are of ginger and soy and the lightest hit of chilli. A boisterously seasoned then grilled piece of pork belly arrives with encouragingly blackened edges, but there is another dainty salad on the side. The most traditional dish is the soft, sticky mushroom rice, finished in a hot stoneware bowl so it has formed a crisped bottom or nurungji. You are invited to finish the dish yourself with a jug of sweetened soy, a rare moment of audience participation.
For dessert we have a scoop of chocolate mousse with a delicate tea-flavoured ice cream, pieces of blood orange, tuile and, at the bottom, sponge. It is evidence of time spent in a grown-up restaurant’s pastry section. Calong presents as one kind of restaurant, but is experienced as quite another. It’s also a tribute to the value of a mixed career. Joo Won has put all of that experience to seriously good use.
Calong
35 Stoke Newington Church St, London N16 0NX; 020 3561 4798; calonglondon.com
Small plates £6-£13
Large plates £23-£26
Dessert £9
Email Jay at jay.rayner@ft.com
Read Jay Rayner every weekend on FT Edit. Free for 30 days, then just £4.99 a month. Email Jay at jay.rayner@ft.com
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