Soju Girl, Canberra

A few weeks ago a few of us from work bounded over to the Soju Girl in Civic to check out if it was worth the hype. One of the group, W, had been before and loved it so was keen to go back. I had also heard great things from other friends so was happy to try it out despite them no longer offering their 2 for 1 small plates deal. A few of us got cocktails (these were $10, not sure if it was some special deal on the night we went) but I stuck to a mango nectar.

Soju girl have been described as 'Asian fusion', a tag which generally makes me wary of the restaurant it is slapped on, and Soju Girl themselves seem ambivalent at best about the term given their reference to it at the start of their menu. Basically it was modern Asian-ish tapas so share plates galore. The first dish of the night was the wagyu carpaccio, which although nice was a tiny serving. I can barely recall how it tasted given splitting the dish between 5 meant we got to each have about 1 cubic centrimetre's worth.

The others also ordered stuffed zucchini flowers, an ingredient I normally love, but the description of the dish (it was stuffed with sushi rice and served with a capsicum based sauce) didn't appeal to me so I skipped it. The people who got it rated it highly, however.

This dish was described as Korean Gnocchi on the menu. As far as I could tell it definitely wasn't gnocchi as we normally know it (i.e. potato pasta) but given the lovely chewy texture and the menu description I suspect it was a version of Korean rice cake (or Tteok). This was probably my favourite dish of the night.

Next we had we had seared tuna with battered and fried sushi. This was tasty but pretty unmemorable.

Our last small plate was the pork belly which was the dish I had been looking forward to the most; a friend had gone on about how it good it was. However, most of us agreed that it was disappointing. It was a rather fatty bit of meat, even by pork belly standards. I generally prefer the fat on my pork belly a lot more rendered, which generally requires a good amount of cooking. Additionally despite it being described as 'crispy pork' and being (I suspect) deep fried , something I definitely don't object to, the crackling was about as crispy as a soggy biscuit. The flavour was also nothing to write home about and I thought the addition of bacon to the dish was a bit of gimmick that didn't really work. 

Our first large plate was beef with king oyster mushrooms and asparagus on a pumpkin puree. This wasn't bad but I thought the quality of the meat could have been better.

Our last dish of the night was duck breast with some sort of grapefruit asian inspired salad. The duck was just OK and the salad wasn't particularly pleasant. Even putting my dislike of grapefruit aside, the dressing was too acidic, to the point that the leaves in the salad were very heavily wilted. It was overall quite bland and uninspired.

The ambience was ok, decor and service were very middle of the road. The price wasn't too bad, though—came out to a bit over two hunge for the 5 of us. Overall it was a pretty pleasant experience but I wouldn't be rushing to go back.