Korean cuisine and sour beer is a match made in heaven
Hirata bun purveyors and one of the vendors in Edinburgh Street Food at the Omni Centre has taken up a temporary home at the Porty Vault, finds Gaby Soutar
I’ve got a dusty can of Vault City Brewing’s sour beer in my cupboard. It’s been there for about two years, and I’m scared to open it.
The idea of this drink gives me flashbacks to my alcopop years, and so that poor old tinny is neglected.
However, there was no shirking of the genre on my first visit to this Edinburgh brewer’s pub in Portobello.
Well, I was hardly going to ask for a glass of prosecco, was I?
As part of their drinks flights, I tried mini thirdof-a-pint beakers and shot glass tasters of colourful potions including Iron Brew, Kirsch of Life (dark chocolate and morello cherry), Triple Fruit Mango, one that tastes like Skittles, and another that was similar to a fruity kombucha.
It was a whirlwind of tangy nutty professor flavours, all of which quickly converted me to this modern sour beer thing.
I needed less convincing when it came to the food, which is courtesy of a kitchen takeover from one of my favourites, hirata bun purveyors, Bundits, who will be in residence here, offering dinner Wednesday to Sunday, until the end of May.
It’s nice for them to have an extended presence, since their standalone Leith venue recently closed down.
Although they’re still one of the vendors in Edinburgh Street Food at the Omni Centre, this venue seems like an even more natural partnership.
They have other plans too, with a potential new outlet in the pipeline, and they’ll be adding brunch to the Porty Vault menu from tomorrow.
For fans, the menu features lots of Bundits greatest hits dishes. It wasn’t our first rodeo. We’ve had the Korean fried chicken bao and their braised short rib versions before, and, back when I reviewed their original branch during lockdown takeaway days, we were in raptures over the salt and pepper king oyster mushroom number.
Instead, this time, we tried the prawn katsu (£6.50), which featured one of their plump, soft and fluffy baos, as pale as Marilyn Manson and filled with chopped iceberg lettuce, sweet chilli sauce and a hot patty of feathery battered mashed prawn.
We downed it, then moved onto the punchy and rich Szechuan lamb bao (£6.50), with meat that was doused in black garlic mayo and pickled sesame.
Our hero dish of the night was probably the salt and pepper oyster mushrooms (£6.50), in a crumbly mousecoloured batter, with a few shreds of pickled carrot on top and a ramekin of roasted garlic mayo on the side.
There is just one pudding available (£6.50), if you manage to get that far. It’s an example of a dessert from the Bundits team’s other business, SoftCore. It’s a stonker of a hyper sweet boost, with a base of warm and fudgy chocolate pecan cookie dough, and a large scoop of miso ice-cream on top. Sharing this between two would be satisfactory.
All the Bundits food, in its salty and bold richness, works really well with the sour beer. So, it’s a pity they’re only here for a short time as they seem like a match made in heaven.