Year of Eating Differently (76): Assa, St Giles High Street

In that scruffy area behind Charing Cross road and just south of Centrepoint there's a ragbag collection of restaurants, including Assa. I was sold this on the basis it was a Japanese venue, so I was expecting some teppanyaki or similar, but it turns out to be a rather odd place - you go through what looks suspiciously like the front door of a house, into a small room whose only decoration is a massive painting of the Korean flag on the ceiling, and a few body parts that somebody has drawn in pencil on the wallpaper next to where we sat.
It was almost empty when we came in (12:40) but about two minutes later was full of people. Possibly we're good at attracting customers. Tea was free, so the fact that it was lukewarm is forgiveable. Being as it was Korean rather than Japanese, the chopsticks were incredibly hard to use, but that's tough. It was a cold day, and for some reason the deliveryman had decided to drop off all his boxes just after we arrived (ie at lunchtime when there might be customers having lunch and not wanting the door left open in the cold) but apart from that it wasn't bad. One slip up though - while one of us had a chicken stir fry that was certainly big enough, myself and my female companion for this meal were told that the vegetable and egg hot pot would be too big for one. Either I've a gargantuan appetite or this was manifestly not true, so although it was a decent thing to eat and warmed me through nicely, I had to stop off on the way back for something else to eat, which rather invalidates the point of all this. So it doesn't deserve a green blob.

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