Per & Kor – restaurant review

Persian and Korean cuisines aren’t conventional bedfellows, but don’t tell that to the husband-and-wife team behind Per & Kor, Gloucester Road’s newest dining room.

Tastefully lit with several full tables one blustery Thursday evening, bluesy music played in the background as the friendly owner bustled over with the lengthy menu, running to three pages of A4, plus a menu of soft drinks (BYO if you fancy anything stronger than saffron tea).

Rather than attempting fusion cuisine, the dishes stay separated with a range of Persian starters, Korean appetisers, and a vast selection of mains encompassing both sides of the planet. I plumped for a Korean starter of spicy seasoned rice cakes (£6.90) with kimchi alongside (£2.50), followed by the Persian dish of Gheimeh Bademjan – lamb stew with split peas, aubergine and saffron rice (£9.90).

Korean starter of rice cakes, plus a side of kimchi (picked cabbage)

My starter arrived rapidly. The sauce that the tteok-bokki (rice cakes) swam in packed a huge flavour punch, the spice hitting me right between the eyes. Once the shock was over, it gave way to a sweeter flavour that soothed the burn. Pieces of vegetable added bite to an otherwise soft dish, although the rice cakes were glutinous and chewy without a hint of rubberiness. I was graciously offered a spoon as the last couple of slippery cakes evaded my chopsticks, and throughout the night no wobbly table was unfixable or cork extraction too tricky for the attentive one-man front-of-house team.

The kimchi – an ice-cold relief to my singed palate – was supremely delicate. There was no overwhelming pickled flavour, just a light tang like a breath of fresh air, and a crunchy texture a long way from the often-slimy shop-bought version.

Inside the dining room on Gloucester Road

A lull allowed for a sip of ginseng tea and a chance to peruse the decor – even more eclectic than the menu, if that were possible – but somehow forming a stylish whole. Yellow gingham farmhouse-kitchen wallpaper butts up against traditional Asian prints depicting herbs and flowers; modern shelving supports everything from terracotta pots to a bird box.

But with fresh flowers in jam jars and candles on every table, and the Persian husband assisting his Korean wife in the open kitchen, where she could be heard expertly chopping and frying the meat for the fresh dishes, it was homely and comforting, like having dinner in their front room.

Persian main course of Gheimeh Bademjan, a lamb and aubergine stew

The main course arrived smelling deliciously fragrant: a pile of bright yellow-topped rice and a steaming bowl of lamb stew with a long piece of roasted aubergine alongside, soaking up the flavour of the sauce. Its flesh was silky soft, as was the melt-in-the-mouth lamb, so tender that it fell apart with the merest touch of the fork. The sauce was gently spiced and pleasantly oily without leaving a slick in the bowl: the dish couldn’t have been more well-balanced. Even the roasted cherry tomatoes tasted delicious. I finished off the last of the sauce with a spoon as several more tables filled with hungry diners, keen to try both sides of the menu.

Above the door to the kitchen of Per & Kor hangs a wooden sign declaring: “We may not have it all together, but together we have it all”. No truer words were ever spoken about a restaurant that could so easily have lapsed into gimmicky territory if it had attempted to fuse dishes from two such different cuisines.

While the two sides of the menu might not compliment in a way that diners are used to in other restaurants that pick a style and stick with it, clearly there is a huge amount of talent in the kitchen and love in every dish that makes the whole dining experience greater than the sum of its parts.

Per & Kor
362 Gloucester Road, Bristol, BS7 8TP
0117 330 1603