Cassandra See’s New Korean Bistro In Food Court Will Be Helmed By Ex-Grand Hyatt Jeju Chef

She has also partnered with actor Haden Hee, 40, and Shers Lim, 42, who have a wealth of experience in F&B to help her. Haden, whom you might remember from dramas like A Jungle Survivor and Your Hand In Mine, is the owner of Korean food products wholesaler Hanguk Kitchen and now-defunct restaurants Kimchi and Guksu, both previously located at Suntec City, while Shers was a co-founder of BLVD, a chain of corporate restaurants and bars. She and her partners sold the biz in 2015.

Cassandra and her team are trained by Hanguk Kitchen’s head chef, who used to be an executive chef at Grand Hyatt Jeju, while another Korean sous chef, also from Grand Hyatt Jeju, will be brought in to helm the bistro’s kitchen in February. Meanwhile, the Korean head chef initially partnered Haden as co-owner for Hanguk Kitchen but is now an employee. Instead of making everything from scratch on-site, now most of the sauces and soup bases are prepared in Hanguk Kitchen’s central kitchen in Woodlands. The recipes are still mostly Cassandra’s — but refined using restaurant-style techniques.

“We want to help Cassandra commercialise her skills,” shares Haden. “Being a home cook and a commercial cook are very different. You are now handling large volumes of raw ingredients and you need to churn meals out fast. If we are going to do everything here, it is going to be very time-consuming. So, these are areas where Hanguk Kitchen can value-add to this business. My technical team is also working with Cassandra to streamline processes.”

Meanwhile, Cassandra still handles most of the cooking at the bistro for now, but will hand over the reins to her staff when filming for her new acting project begins in a couple of months.

For Haden, who is the younger brother of former Mediacorp actor Julian Hee, Hungry Korean also marks his “comeback to the restaurant business”. He shuttered his two restaurants, as well as three Kimchi Express food kiosks, in 2020 when the pandemic struck.

“I am glad I took a two-year break. Now the government is starting to open up and people are living with Covid-19, so we want to slowly make an entry back into the restaurant business,” says Haden.

“This is a very good test bed for us. We felt that for Hungry Korean to go from a coffeeshop stall to a full-fledged restaurant is too big a leap, so we want to take baby steps. If this venture is successful, we hope to franchise out the brand and open multiple outlets.”

Situated at the far end of Food Junction, Hungry Korean is one of six “hybrid restaurants” within the food court. There are also nine smaller stalls in the space.

Though Hungry Korean, is “supposed to seat 80 pax” and “have its own area”, this was not very clear when we visited. According to Cassandra, the “demarcation is not done yet”. As a result, diners were seen eating food from other stalls in their space.

“We are okay with that now, but we are pushing for the landlord to demarcate [the area] more clearly, so we can turn it into a full-fledged bistro. We are going to add physical demarcations like plants, and we were promised different furniture [from the rest of the food court],” she says, adding that they will also be furnishing it with their own bar stools and high tables. The bistro also still operates very much like a food court stall. Customers place their orders at the counter and are given a buzzer to collect their food when it’s ready.

Currently, the space, which cost a “mid five-figure sum” to set up, is decked with warm wood grain vinyl tables and black metal and wooden chairs, with two cosy booth seats at the side. Taking centrestage near its semi-open kitchen is an Instagram-worthy artificial plant panel splashed with the words “baegopayo” (hungry in Korean) and neon finger hearts.

If you’d like to sit outdoors, the food court also boasts a communal alfresco area with a good view of River Valley and Tiong Bahru. “This is a hidden gem. You can have drinks while you enjoy the sun set and we were told there are plans to add fairy lights,” says Haden.

The upgraded location is matched with a bigger and more elevated menu, featuring not only the best of Hungry Korean, but also signatures from Haden’s previous restaurants like Korean fried chicken, jajangmyeon and hotpots.

“After we closed, a lot of people asked when I’m going to relaunch Guksu as they miss our fried chicken. Now they can find the flavours of Guksu here. The old favourites are prepared the same way, with the same taste,” shares Haden.

Prices are about “20 per cent” higher than at Hungry Korean’s previous stall. The starter price for their rice bowls or noodles like kimchi ramyeon is $7.90, and goes as high as $12.90 for their jajangmyeon and signature beef bulgogi rice. There are also tapas like grilled hamachi cheek ($13.90), while hotpots, which are offered after 3pm, are from $39.90.

Cassandra is currently working with their chef to create more fusion dishes like tteokbokki mac and cheese, and truffle jajangmyeon, which is “very trendy in Korea”.

Once they sort out the opening kinks, they will also offer complimentary soup of the day and banchan with their mains. Around six different types of banchan like kimchi, spicy chives, and yellow pickled radish, will be offered on a rotational basis. All the banchan will be made in-house and customers can expect around three side dishes on any given day.

The hearty pork belly hotpot is like a refined version of army stew. Instead of processed ingredients, the hotpot is brimming with neatly-arranged kimchi, napa cabbage, bean curd, enoki mushrooms, diced potato, thinly sliced pork belly, and kimchi stew. Slightly spicy and full-bodied, the soup is made by boiling ingredients like fried kimchi, pork belly, and minced garlic, in pork broth for almost two hours in the central kitchen. The pork belly was tasty and melt-in-your-mouth tender — pity it was a tad gamey. They also offer Beef Short Rib Hotpot for $49.90.

Hungry Korean offers two flavours of KFC — Honey Soy and Sweet Spicy — which were the stars at Haden’s Guksu restaurant. For $9.90, you get a mix of six drumettes and mid-joints. The chook is “double coated with tempura flour and twice-fried” for maximum crispiness. It pays off: the chicken remained crunchy even though we dug into it an hour after it was fried. While tender and juicy, we would have liked the chicken saucier and flavours bolder. The Honey Soy was more sweet than savoury and the Sweet Spicy version was slightly tart. We prefer the latter, though it could do with a bit more heat.

Thin slices of beef short plate are marinated overnight in ingredients like soy sauce, sesame oil, Korean pear juice, sliced onions, and black pepper, before being pan-fried with shredded carrots and heaped on short-grain rice. The juicy beef slices were a little too heavy on the pepper. Otherwise, this makes for a pretty delish rice bowl.

You can’t go wrong with the pork collagen soup, which was one of the bestsellers at Cassandra’s Geylang Bahru hawker stall (it cost $8.80 for a similar portion back then). Created for the senior citizens living in the neighbourhood, the peppery and garlicky “Korean bak kut teh”, as Cassandra calls it, is made with pork bone collagen broth and boasts chunks of tender pork ribs. Served with rice, the soup is robust, comforting, and as good as we remember it to be.

According to Cassandra, the dish is a hit at the food court too: “We’ve only been here for a couple of weeks and the pork collagen soup already has its fans. Some regulars from our old stall also came here just for this. We sell around 50 bowls of soup daily.”

This is one of six fusion tapas dishes on the menu. Perfectly grilled with a hint of salt and topped with a dusting of chilli powder and sesame seeds, the yellowtail boasts a light char and you can taste the sweetness of the fish. Nice with sake.

Chewy wheat noodles smothered with thick, black bean sauce, diced pork, sliced onions, and topped with a sunny side up. Although the jajangmyeon is touted as a bestseller, it doesn’t quite live up to its full potential. The slightly spicy gravy is lighter on the palate and lacks umami punch.

With its expanded kitchen, Hungry Korean 2.0 offers a more elevated menu. Some teething issues aside, we’re pretty impressed by some of the new offerings like the hotpot and tapas. We also like that we can enjoy a casual restaurant vibe without the price tag, and the alfresco area makes it a chill spot to unwind over drinks.

Hungry Korean is at #03-113, Food Junction @ Great World City, 1 Kim Seng Promenade, S237994. Open daily 11am-10pm. https://www.instagram.com/hungrykoreanfood/

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Photos: Alvin Teo