Bubbling cauldrons and thunderous hot pots worth queueing for at Hansang’s new Chinatown outpost

Previous SlideNext Slide

For fans of long-simmered beef and ox-bone soups who live near the CBD, Hansang’s arrival in Haymarket is like the Beatles touching down at Kingsford Smith. The family-run diner specialises in broths of far-reaching flavour that are cooked for three days so the collagen triples down on itself and the soup becomes so much more than leg bones and water. In Korea, it’s called sagol-gukmul. I call it a good reason to wait in line on Goulburn Street.

Hansang’s new Chinatown outpost has only been open for six weeks, but there’s almost always a queue, just like there is at the restaurant’s original beer hall-style dining room in Strathfield. At least you can watch the signature soup bubbling like a Disney villain’s cauldron in the window while you wait. This is also a fine time to start planning your lunch.

Do you want that milky-white broth with hunks of gelatinous oxtail ($30), beef brisket ($25) or blood sausage soon-dae ($24)? Squidgy, fiery, tteokbokki rice sticks ($21) to start, or raw crab pulsing with a spice-loaded marinade ($32)? A fiercely crisp seafood pancake ($27) is essential, of course, but what about the stone-pot bibimbap ($26)? And the grilled mackerel ($27)? Or do you simply ignore everything else and hunker down with a thunderous hot pot?

I’ve eaten at Hansang Strathfield several times over the past four years and rarely order the same thing twice, soup excepted. With close to 150 home-style Korean dishes on the menu at both venues, the FOMOOWTOTIE (Fear Of Missing Out On What The Other Table Is Eating) is real.

The Haymarket site can be noisy but you don’t come to Hansang for a meditative bowl of rice.

Here’s the thing, though: it’s pretty much all deeply satisfying gear, so order to your mood and appetite and a swell time should ensue. Naturally, you’ll also want to bring a few mates, preferably the kind who won’t be put off by lighting brighter than some city convenience stores and drinking water from paper cups.

The Haymarket site can be noisy, too – about the same level as any given pub on a Friday night. You don’t come to Hansang for a meditative bowl of rice. You come to load the table with food and friends, and forget the cares of the week.

A volley of free banchan dishes will land first, bang, bang, bang. Crunchy kimchi, bittersweet radish, chewy black beans and more. There are cans of Korea’s much-loved Cass lager ($6) if you’ve got a thirst, plus a few snappy rice spirits, plum wine and imported soft drinks. Bring-your-own wine is $5 per person, but I can’t imagine anything pairing better with the food than terrifically cold beer.

The oxtail soup is essential for first-time diners: creamy like a tonkotsu ramen broth, but without the heavy gravitational pull. Add some accompanying purple-hued, multigrain rice (japgokbap) for maximum deliciousness. A pale-gold gomtang soup, meanwhile, is just as layered with direct, beefy flavour, thanks to a long cook with more bits and bobs from the cow, not just bones.

Offal lovers should pounce on the “special intestine” gomtang ($25) heaving with fall-apart slices of brisket and honeycomb tripe. Dissolve-in-your-mouth pork belly ($55) is another must, simmered with garlic and herbs, and sliced into ivory swatches to be cradled in perilla leaves with peppery-sweet ssamjang sauce. Highly fatty, yes, but this is why the gods created kimchi. Plus, there’s always the tofu and mushroom hot pot ($65) if you need a good dose of nutrition.

Those steaming, cook-at-the-table hot pots, gee whiz! There’s an intimidating number to choose from. A dumpling-lined option ($65) can be fun if there are kids to impress, and I have a soft spot for the lush cartilage and tendons bobbing about in an ox-knee number ($65). But I also can’t help thinking I’m missing a trick by not ordering the mussel-loaded seafood hotpot ($65), which seems to be on every third table. FOMOOWTOTIE is unforgiving.

Further hotpotting adventures will have to wait, though. Restaurant manager Henry Lee recently put me onto the $69 “spicy marinated beef-rib stew” (galbi-jjim) and I’m an instant devotee. We’re talking braised, slip-off-the-bone meat in a rust-red jungle of spring onion and bean sprouts underlined by fearless, slow-building heat. Another Cass please, stat.

If the oxtail soup is the Beatles, the galbi-jjim is the Rolling Stones. Elvis might be the mountainous serve of fried chicken ($39), and let’s say Sting is the “healthy stone pot rice” with chestnuts ($26). Mick Jagger reckons “you can’t always get what you want”, but then I guess he’s never dined at Hansang.