There’s a treat in storage for Korean food fans
Bonkers set-up adds to the experience for Anna
The last time I took my best friend out for a meal, we went to Unalome and had some of the most elegant food in Scotland.
When I told her that this next dinner would be Korean street food served from an industrial unit in Old Kilpatrick, she thought I was joking. Or at least exaggerating.
Until we pulled into a strip of shipping containers underneath the Erskine Bridge.
As we parked between the metal boxes she was forced to admit that I had been deadly serious and there was, in fact, a Korean street food outlet between the campervan garage and coffee shack. Where, she wondered, had I found out about this place?
If I did not know her better, I’d think she was impressed.
I’d like to say I have foodie sources across every small town in West Dunbartonshire and beyond. In fact, I just spend a lot of time on Instagram.
I also love Korean food and will happily drive out along the Clyde and sit on a picnic bench beside a shipping container to eat some.
The menu is not long and is more Asian fusion than strictly Korean. Despite it only being 5pm, the hangover stew was sold out. As neither of us had been on the batter the night before, that was not a disaster. It also contained one of my most-feared ingredients, Asian Spam.
Having dodged that bullet, we ordered pretty much everything else. I often struggle with gyoza, finding them slimy, tasteless and generally underwhelming.
Green Onion’s plump chaps suffered from none of these problems. A thorough browning in the wok removed any trace of slither from the skins. They were well filled with a vegetable mix with, I’m guessing, cabbage and carrot.
Even better was the Green Onion special, a pancake-omelette hybrid oozing with cheese and spiked with plenty of chopped spring onions. It had something of the Indian roti about it, with its dark blisters from a quick fry-off
in a searing pan. I like the OG, a spring onion pancake, but making them more substantial is a masterstroke.
It also makes them easier to eat with fingers, an essential for all street foods.
K-dawgs, or Korean corn dogs, are a speciality here. (Perhaps they should be called OK-dawgs.) They are either a frankfurter, or a fat stick of mozzarella, speared with a skewer, rolled in panko crumbs, deep-fried and then zig-zagged with sauce.
We were offered these in a dizzying range of combinations and opted for the mini versions with half and half cheese and sausage.
What arrived did not look very mini at all, more like a cross between a Weetabix and a substantial crunchy ice lolly. The OK-dawg is not a sophisticated dish. The mozza forms loopy strings and the mix of ketchup and mustard mayo escapes on to the clothing. But there are occasions when elegance is overrated and this was one of them.
Bao buns are, I learned from my Instagram trawl, a new addition to the Green Onion menu. Unlike many places that buy in Styrofoam-like versions, these are made in-house. This means they are not cute and perky but floppier and flatter than the packing material ones. Stuffed with shredded duck and pickled red onions, the taste made up for the lack of visual appeal. They went particularly well with the seaweed salad, a titchy tub of flavoursome marinated rubber bands that added a salty poke to the sandwich.
Green Onion is not the first Asian restaurant to use the initials KFC to stand for Korean fried chicken. And while I preferred these deep glazed morsels to anything the cartoon colonel has ever produced, it was not my favourite part of the meal.
Beneath the heavy layer of lacquered batter, hot sauce and onion shards, the chook could have been anything.
I took them home where they were devoured by my teenage son with the passion that the young reserve for the fried foodstuffs that their health-conscious parents never put on the table. If you are in that demographic, take note. Pork belly surprised me by coming thinly sliced and fried in batter. I’m not sure this showed off its fatty pleasures to their best advantage but the Teenager disagreed and those leftovers also went down without touching the sides.
As we were leaving, a lad very similar to the one I have at home arrived with his mother to pick their Saturday evening takeaway. I love the idea of the youth of the Clyde Riviera favouring cool Korean munch over the mass-marketed bucket food of the giant chains.
Green Onion is everything I love – independent, unexpected, a little bit bonkers. Old Kilpatrick, you are one lucky village.