“This is it?”

“I’m not sure about this…”

“Are we gonna get sick?”

Entering Assa, a small Korean restaurant behind Centrepoint, my friends are less than enthusiastic. Ok, I can’t say I’m so open-minded that the hole-in-the-wall entrance, cruddy floor and browning wallpaper filled me with confidence, but hey – talk about off-the-beaten-track while smack on it, right? Just minutes from the crowded tedium of Oxford Street, a stone’s throw from the overpriced restaurants with rip-off (oops, I mean pre-theatre) menus, is Saint Giles High Street. On it, a row of unassuming Korean restaurants, one of which is Assa.

The menu is straightforward and delightfully cheap – sides such as kimchi and radish pickles go for £1.50 and noodle dishes are priced £4.50-5.50. Stir fries come in around £5 and hot-pots (more on this later) range from £8 to £12. They also do lunch specials from £4.50.

My two friends decide to share a spicy beef hot-pot while I go for rice and stir fried sweet potato noodles and vegetables. We’re brought the water we ordered, which appears to be a kind of tepid green tea. Not bad, but not water, despite the waitress’s insistence to the contrary.

My dish is a hefty lunch of perfectly cooked rice with glass noodles and stir-fried veg. There’s some rogue pork in the dish and no clear evidence of sweet potato in the noodles apart from a gold tinge. It was delicious.

My friends are the winners though. The waitress brings them a table-top gas hob and sets upon it a metal dish of uncooked beef, noodles, tofu and vegetables in broth. After 10 minutes or so of prodding it with our chopsticks and wondering if it’s safe to eat, my friends dig in. The meat is tender and flavorful, the broth subtly spicy, the whole thing tricky to eat.

Note: Korean chopsticks are slender and metal. Not great ‘first date’ food, but well worth the splashes. Assa, then, is a recession-friendly winner.

53 Saint Giles High Street
WC2H 8LH