Charim

A pared-back Korean restaurant where precision cooking, serious flavour and generous value come together in sharing dishes.

The room is minimalist, the tables close, glasses of soju clinking, groups of friends leaning in over shared plates. It’s casual and unfussy – the kind of place that lets the food do the talking because it can. That conversation starts with chilli-marinated raw prawns: four large Shark Bay specimens slicked in a chilli-soy marinade that’s peppery and garlicky, spicy and salty, without ever trampling the prawns’ natural sweetness. The seafood spring onion pancake follows, thin and crisp-edged, studded with prawns, squid and mussels. Unlike the dense, doughy versions that haunt too many menus, this one stays light inside, finished with pickled radish for lift and bite. Bossam is the centrepiece. Pork jowl, marinated in nuruk, seared for a hint of smoke and pressure-cooked until meltingly tender, arrives with lettuce leaves, ssamjang, raw garlic, chilli and a crisp, freshly made radish kimchi that cuts cleanly through the fat. You build it yourself, happily, with your hands. The bulgogi Charim platter lands like a feast: wagyu beef cooked hot and fast for tenderness and char, and an array of banchan. There’s a neatly rolled omelette studded with fermented pollock roe, silky acorn jelly, and the standout – grilled mackerel cooked to order, skin crackling, flesh juicy, finished with a savoury doenjang-mirin glaze.