My love for Miga’s mung bean pancake runs deep. It’s obscene, really, the amount of people I’ve sent to eat that holy dish. I first tried the bindaetteok last year, a few weeks after the restaurant opened in Hackney. I went with a few other locals, and we ordered most of the menu. My Korean American friend explained that the pancake was a classic home-cooked dish; the sort of thing you grow up eating without ceremony.
I pictured the stuff I ate growing up, and imagined the pancake would arrive globby and heinous – something I’d soak in soy and immediately forget about. It wouldn’t matter anyway; I was fired up for the beef tartare and ox-bone broth, the dishes everyone was already banging on about.
How wrong I was. How naive. How gustatorily underprepared.
This pancake is like nothing I’ve eaten before. Made from mung beans instead of flour, the batter isn’t smooth – the texture is complex, alive. It arrives golden, gorgeous, confident. Fully aware it’s the best thing on the table and understanding of the fact that you are not emotionally prepared for what’s about to happen inside your mouth. The edges are fried to a crisp so glorious I squeaked. Inside it’s warm and squashy and tart. A pancake with layers, personality and, crucially, no grease. No sog. No weird aftertaste. Just 10/10 flavour with an ASMR crunch.
Then there’s the sauce. That dipping sauce it comes with? Ridiculous. You will lick the bowl clean. I definitely clutched the table at one point. Spiritual awakening or mild panic attack? Perhaps both.
Miga itself is effortlessly cool. So cool I’ve tried to let them know I’m writing this piece several times and I’m yet to have a reply. Who cares? They have me locked. You’ll clink soju glasses between locals like me, Simone Rocha-draped twenty-somethings, and bankers who think London Fields is a personality. The interiors are barely-there sparse, but the dad is in the kitchen making his mother’s ancient bone broth, and the next generation family members are all being lovely and polite to diners, as well as each other. Who needs expensive wall art when you make the greatest pancake on earth?
I Can’t Stop Thinking About is a series about dishes Broadsheet editors and contributors are obsessed with.
