Bo Kantina, Glasgow

I had to go to Glasgow for my haircut appointment on Saturday there. We often go to Sarti, an Italian restaurant in the town for lunch, which is our favourite place.  We even say that the weekend would not be the same without Sarti!  However on this occasion I thought we try somewhere else for a change, so I checked Glasgow restaurant listings on TripAdvisor to see where we could go.

Saturday on Buchanan Street in Glasgow 

Bo Kantina (http://www.bokantina.co.uk/#_=_) is ranked 9th out of 1,910 restaurants in Glasgow with 23 positive reviews - 21 excellent and 2 very good, so I said to my husband that I wanted to try this place. I think it's a bar, not a restaurant  and serves Mexican/Korean tapas kind of dishes. The menu also has kimchi, Korean spicy pickled cabbage, which my husband likes. We had no idea what to expect ....

The place is in the basement level on West Regent Street, located between Amber Regent Chinese restaurant and Cup Tea Lounge.

Inside is a bit dark (and the cloudy weather outside did not help) but with colourful decor throughout to project image of indoor street food and soul food with Mexican and Korean twist or as they say, Seoul Food!  (Get it?, 'Seoul' Food as Seoul is the capital city of South Korea!).

There are some interesting things on the menu. As we don't eat meat, selections can be a bit limited. We decided to try four dishes from the menu, 3 from tapas size starter and 1 side dish.

We had crispy king prawn tacos with Gochujang Mayo in two soft shell tacos filled with lettuce, picked cabbage.  Gochujang is  a savoury, spicy Korean condiment made from red chilis, glutinous rice, fermented soybeans and salt. Sounds interesting.

Also had side dish of roast broccoli in garlic, ginger and soy dressing, and bao (soft steamed buns) with filings of crispy king prawns, gochujang, mayo and coriander.  We both liked the bao and also broccoli.

The last dish we tried was Tostadas - two crisp tortillas with the Terong Belado, Black Beans and Pico De Gallo toppings.  Hah?  What is this, that's what I thought when I looked at it on the menu. It is an Indonesian dish of eggplant (aubergine) with chilli sauce and Mexican cooked salsa.

 

We ordered this dish as they did not have salmon tostadas that day. I like aubergines and I thought this was quite a tasty dish. My husband does not like aubergine but he thought this was fine.

As they are Mexican/Korean dishes, we were expecting dishes to be rather hot and spicy but they are not.  I then realised that there is a bottle of chilli on the table so we could have put this to make them spicy but it was too late for that as we have eaten all already by then.

You can also learn how to use chopsticks if you want to use a pair to have a noodle or rice dish later on for main course.

The bill came to just under £20 for 3 starter tapas, 1 side dish of roast broccoli and a large bottle of sparkling water to share between us, so it's not too bad, but unfortunately they don't fill you up as each tapas is small in portion. Perhaps we should have 1 starter each and tried main course of either noodle or rice dish ....

We were there for lunch and the place was rather quiet. I imagine this place would be quite busy in the evening. Each dishes are good and tasty, some are interesting dishes. Do we go back there again?  Probably not, but that's because we were expecting more of Korean influence on dishes with hot and spiciness and also selection of what we could eat is limited as we don't eat meat.  I can imagine that this place would be popular amongst young people and be an interesting place if you like to meet up with group of friends for quick bite to eat and drinks in evenings.

Well, at least we tried a new place, which is fun. When we came home, my daughter Maria asked if we would be going to Sarti the next day as we were not 'Sarti's-fied with lunch, hahaha. 

That's all forks.