Bullgogi, Manchester M1: ‘Highly decent, amenable, human-free dining’ – restaurant review

Bullgogi, a whopping new interactive multiscreen Korean restaurant in Manchester’s Piccadilly Plaza, has arrived, heralding the end of traditional hospitality – again. It’s the UK’s largest Korean barbecue restaurant – 165 covers, traditional tabletop grills at every booth – but has no servers with notepads, just screens. Your gyeran jjim, your dolsot bibimbap, your bulgogi: jab the at-table screen and it will arrive, ferried by human hand. Think McDonald’s, but as a gargantuan restaurant. Jae Cho and his Maguro Group have built an empire of 21 locations across London and Manchester, but this is their biggest venture to date. We arrive without reservation, which is no problem, because Bullgogi is the size of a small planet. We order pots of barley tea and pints of Asahi at £6.90, and sit back to enjoy the Blade Runner vibes.

Bullgogi’s largely human-free hospitality will either delight or horrify you. Personally, I greet our new robot hospitality overlords with calm scepticism. Over the past few decades, I have staggered through the Covid QR menu wilderness, prised my dinner from the temperamental jaws of robot fridges in rural farm shops, and watched with mirth as the robot chef at a recent Soho yakitori joint still required a human to load every skewer into it before performing. For these reasons, I greet Bullgogi with a raised eyebrow. In fact, the moment we flag, via the screen, a food intolerance at our table, a bright, chipper human appears immediately to check through the menu for said offending item.

Bullgogi’s ‘crisp and crimped’ chicken dumplings.

Bullgogi is a restaurant that’s hoping to serve all palates. Experienced Korean food lovers can head straight for the doenjang jjigae, an earthy, soya bean paste broth with beef, or the sundubu jjigae (silken tofu with seafood). If you’re preparing for war, there is budae jjigae, the Korean army stew in which spam, ham, kimchi and noodles are simmered into something rib-sticking enough to fuel a march to the 38th parallel. There is wobbly gyeran jjim (steamed egg custard), Korean beef tartare seasoned with sesame oil, and gimmari, or crispy seaweed rolls stuffed with glass noodles. For pan-Asian regulars who might know bibimbap and the likes of double-fired Korean fried chicken or kimchi pajeon (fermented kimchi pancake), Bullgogi has them covered, too. You’ll see Korean students from Manchester university using it as a canteen alongside tables of pensioners from Rochdale encountering Korean food for the first time. This is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds, and the screen ordering seems to appeal to both.

The ‘highly decent’ chicken bibimbap, at Bullgogi in Manchester.

Bullgogi is not necessarily a place to linger. It is cheap, strip-lit, sparsely decorated; this is a bold new opening that feels more like a 1990s service station than a restaurant; I’ve had glitzier dinners at Forton Services. Even so, there is a sense that food is taken seriously here. The Korean dumplings arrive too hot to devour immediately, but they are crisp and crimped, with a peppery, minced vegetable filling. Ordering the cheese potato pancake, or gamja jeon, was probably an error: no health authority in the world would smile upon me for eating four pieces of deep-fried shredded potato and barrowfuls of melted mozzarella. My lifespan decreased with each mouthful. A stone bowl of silken tofu sundubu jjigae turned up in a fabulous seafood broth – one of the best things we ate – followed by a chicken dolsot bibimbap, which was also highly decent.

Bullgogi’s cheese potato pancake: ‘My lifespan decreased with each mouthful.’

We didn’t use the tabletop grill, and neither did anyone else. The future of the Korean tabletop grill looks patchy. Restaurateurs quietly admit they are hell to service and expensive to run. Modern customers, meanwhile, love the idea of them and then don’t use them, though the bulgogi, LA-style galbi, iberico collar and spicy pork are waiting should you choose to.

Bullgogi is a pleasant, amenable, albeit slightly hollow dining experience. We ate, we paid, we left. There were no desserts. No one noted our departure, as seemingly no robot had alerted them that we were a dine and dash. The drive-thru Costa Coffee-ification of British restaurants continues. Treasure your servers while you have them. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

• Bullgogi, 6A Piccadilly Plaza, Manchester M1 4AH, 0161-553 1141. Open all week, noon-10pm (10.30pm Sat, 9.30pm Sun). From about £30 a head à la carte; lunch menu Mon-Fri, about £13 a head, all plus drinks and service