Damda

Put in, onto, or on; serve, plate, dish up or dish out food. These many suggestive connotations are happily condensed by the Korean word damda; and dish up and dish out superb Korean cuisine is what our titular restaurant Damda does best. Specialising in classic charcoal-barbecued fare alongside traditional and contemporary Korean dishes, Damda is one of a number of modern Korean restaurants popping up in Sydney. There’s a hint of Asian fusion in operation here, an added incentive for the city’s foodies to make Damda’s Norton Street, Leichardt restaurant their next destination.

Damda is a fresh new face in Sydney’s crowded Korean restaurant scene, but it’s a distinctive addition with a bold, striking restaurant down Leichardt’s Norton Street usually packed with diners enjoying the carefully considered, vibrant selection of Korean and Asian-fusion delicacies on offer. Let’s please the purists and dispense with all things on Damda’s menu that are fusion and not all-Korean. Korean fried chicken, Asiatic nachos and tacos are interesting and definitely delicious anomalies that fit perfectly into the Modern Korean vibe that Damda likes to broadcast. We’re here for the soju, but even this traditional tipple, as hallowed in formal dining circles as Japanese sake, is given a mod kick that Sydney’s foodies will love. Grab a carafe of Green Seoul, a white grape and soju slushie, and get ordering.

Top – and decidedly hot – picks from Damda’s menu include the Damda Platter of chilli pork, laden with sweet and spicy pork ribs alongside an Oriental noodle salad, smoked vegetables, kimchi (of course) and three varieties of Korean sauce to drown it all in. All the dishes at Damda’s stripped-back, white-tiled premises in Leichardt are served in stamped-steel trays and bowls, giving the place a canteen feel that works brilliantly with the traditionally social mode that Korean dining aids and abets. This is all well and good, considering that Damda, unlike most other Korean restaurants, doesn’t to the whole BBQ-at-table thing. Instead, a smiling, tattooed, charcoal martial artist does it all for you at a vast, smoking, grill-and-oven apparatus that is an unavoidable focal point in this cosy eatery. This is genuinely a Korean restaurant in Sydney with a difference. Book a table, and bring your friends.