Sáng byMabasa

A single Korean family runs this pocket-sized Surry Hills room, a Fitzroy Street follow-up to the much-loved restaurant they still keep in Balmain. Seating just twenty-two across a counter and two communal tables, it is intimate to the point of familial, which is fitting, since the parents cook while a son works the floor and his wife handles the pickling, desserts and even the graphic design. The kitchen's project is precise: to modernise traditional Korean cooking without diluting it through fusion. Recipes stay strictly Korean; only the plating shifts, composed with a photographer's eye for a generation that eats with its phone first. That means a crackling kimchi pancake, bulgogi, and fried chicken wings, alongside gujeolpan, the old court dish of nine ingredients arranged around thin pancakes to be rolled at the table. Lunch is affordable and quick; evenings turn on a considered set menu that lets the kitchen show its full hand. The result is one of the city's more thoughtful Korean tables, small enough to feel personal and disciplined enough to avoid gimmickry. It reads less as a restaurant expanding a brand than as a family refining, in miniature, everything it already does well.