Sinjeon, Liverpool Street, Sydney

Sinjeon, Liverpool Street, Sydney is the newest branch of the popular Korean street food chain to open in Australia. Their focus is on delicious Korean street food like big bowls of gloriously rich and gooey corn and cheese topokki, crispy seaweed rolls filled with glass noodles and delicious kimbap or Korean style sushi rolls filled with melted cheese! With 776 stores worldwide, does the food deserve the hype?

It is a Friday night and Laura and I have just visited a bar and are looking for something to eat. I wasn't expecting to go out so I haven't brought my camera (so please excuse the phone pics). We have two options to hand and Sinjeon is the first. "If we can find a park we go there, if not we can go to the other place," Laura suggests. I am hoping for Sinjeon and as luck would have it there's a parking spot right nearby. We put our names down on the sheet of paper outside the restaurant and wait. That gives us enough time to peruse the acrylic food models or shokuhin sampuru outside Sinjeon showcasing their signature dishes.

Sinjeon started in Daegu Korea in 1999 as a small snack bar and now has 776 stores worldwide with most of the stores in Korea. There are 15 stores overseas and the first franchise in Australia was Melbourne in 2019. Sydney's store opened in 2022 and is the K-street food brand's 756th store and there is also a store in Sunnybank, Brisbane. The store is walk-in only and doesn't take bookings.

We are not waiting long until we are led inside the salmon pink restaurant. Tables are kind of tight but other patrons are busy engrossed in their own conversations. Ordering is done by QR code where you order and pay online with a surcharge added for credit cards. Then help yourself to the water, napkins and cutlery at the side. Service from the staff is really lovely.

Drinks come out first-there are two soft drink can flavours: grape and nashi pear and these come in squat, fat cans. There is finely chopped fruit in the bottom and the still drinks are very sweet but nice. I water mine down with some of the water to make it a bit less sweet.

"It looks very multi dimensional," remarks Laura as they sat down the Korean fried chicken with a honey soy flavour. It's 250g of boneless, crunchy freshly fried chicken. It's good but it somewhat pales in comparison to the rest of the dishes that are outstandingly tasty.

A very popular dish is the Army-Stew style ramen with a delicious kim chi flavoured soup. It's name Army Stew as it is a historical post war-time dish created in the 1950's after the Korean War when food was smuggled from American military and Koreans used ingredients like SPAM, cheese, baked beans, instant noodles and frankfurts to make stews. There's plenty of mix ins with SPAM, sliced frankfurts, kimchi, fishcakes, rice cakes and a slice of cheese that is half melting on the top. I can usually take or leave army stew but this one is delicious, the soup hits the right flavours and have I mentioned how much I love SPAM? Laura is very much smitten with the kim chi flavoured soup.

They are very much known for their Topokki aka deliciously chewy rice cakes. There are a few varieties available but we go for the corn cheese one that comes out on a separate plate which they lift and scoop into the bowl of scarlet stew. The stew gets it colour and flavour from their own special spicy gochu Korean chilli pepper sauce and once you try it you can see why. It's rich, spicy and sweet and utterly moreish and we fish out chewy topokki, slices of fishcake and cabbage from that delectable sauce. And if you're ever in Daegu, Korea, Sinjeon have the world's only museum devoted to Topokki.

There are around half a dozen fried snacks available and you can get an assorted platter of them that includes 6 fish cakes, 2 seaweed roll, 2 jabchae, 4 dumpling and 2 cheese sticks. They're all tasty and different from each other but the standout is the Kimari or seaweed rolls that are seasoned glass noodles wrapped in nori seaweed sheets and then battered and deep fried. They have a a crisp shell and a lovely, spongy texture when you bite into them. Next time I would get a big serve just of this as it is perfect to dip in the corn cheese topokki. We actually end up dipping everything in the corn cheese topokki and it's so lusciously cheesy, spicy and drippy it feels almost debauched.

Kimbap or kimbab is a cousin of sushi rolls that uses sesame oil instead of seasoned vinegar in the rice. They also tend to be fatter than sushi and and tend to have a lot of filling to rice. We ordered two of them - the first is the SPAM egg kimbap which has SPAM, egg omelette, cucumber, carrot, pickled daikon, sesame seeds and mayonnaise and is made fresh so that the rice is slightly warm. It's fantastic especially if you love SPAM and I end up taking the rest of this home as Laura doesn't eat pork and eat it as a midnight snack.

The cheese kimbap is theur signature kimbab. The rice is flavoured with kimchi and there's some tuna in there too as well as melted cheese. The whole roll is wrapped up in nori. It's almost impossible to pick up a piece without the rice falling apart and the cheese stays nice and melty for a while. It's a bit milder flavoured than the rest of the food but it's fun and I'm glad that we tried it.

After trying all of this we end up leaving with 5 boxes of takeaway that make for the most delicious leftovers the next day for lunch!

So tell me Dear Reader, have you ever tried kimbap? Do you like SPAM? And how do you feel about ordering via QR code?

This meal was independently paid for.

Sinjeon

128 Liverpool St, Sydney NSW 2000

Hours: Tuesday to Sunday 11:30 am–3 pm, 5–9 pm

Closed Monday