Hard hats theme and hearty Korean comfort foods: The Pan Dalin BBQ re-opens as 'construction site'
Essie King
CONTAINER FACTORY
G/F, 20 Austin Avenue, Tsim Sha Tsui
Crowd-favourite Korean restaurant The Pan Dalin BBQ has quietly re-opened with a new concept and new direction. Gone are the days of patrons cooking meat in a DIY barbecue setting.
Instead, the restaurant has reinvented itself as a container-slash-construction site, with an interior that includes a selection of construction hats, shipping container wall panels, an oversized deconstructed clock, and railway signal lights.
The new menu, made up of Korean snacks and comfort food, has dishes meant for sharing and comes with portion sizes to match.
We started with the half-and-half fried original chicken paired with sweet and sour chicken (HK$160). The chicken was tender. Its skin was perfectly crisp and the sauce was exceptionally well done, making this the stand-out dish of the night. This was followed by the military soup (HK$280) or budae-jjigae, filled to the brim with sausages, enoki mushrooms, Korean rich cakes, spam, baked beans, tofu, kimchi and ramen noodles. We ordered a small size, but the portion was generous enough for three people.
We also ordered the bulgogi pan cheeze pizza (HK$150), which came with an unconventional twist: instead of eating it the traditional way, you scoop the toppings up - a new trend in Korea where the pizza base is so thin you cannot pick it up - which led to a very cheesy situation.
We washed all the dishes down with lemon tea (HK$30) and mangoade (HK$55). We recommend ordering the lemon tea, which has a refreshingly bitter and sour taste to it, complementing the richness of some of the dishes.
