It’s a good thing that I don’t tend to give much weight to customer reviews on some of the popular restaurant sites that cover the London area, otherwise I’d probably never eat out. According to the reviews, Gama is a Japanese restaurant with bad toilets, bad food, and worse service.

Shall we have a little reality then? Gama is a Korean restaurant, which happens to also have a small Japanese section to their menu, which is common in a fair few Korean restaurants in London, and typically the Japanese meals are of a much lower quality than you’d expect elsewhere, but the Korean dishes are authentic and definately worth a try.

The first time I ate at Gama, the place was bouncing with Korean music, and at first we didn’t sit down at a table big enough to have any of the BBQ options from the menu but despite the fact that the staff aren’t very proficient in English, they still went out of their way to move us to a table that had space for us to enjoy Korean BBQ.

Only thing that would have been nice would have been a warning to put a napkin on and prevent spatter from the BBQ going all over our clothes, which understandably might cheese a few customers off.

After bypassing all of the police barriers in place to cordon off Dean Street due to the #sohofire that has taken Twitter by storm, we decided to give Gama a second try and see what other picks on the menu were like.

Much deliberation led us to the following:

• Kim chee
• Mixed namul
• Fried tofu
• Dol bibimbap
• Chicken wings

The portions for the mixed namul were generous, as were the portions for the fried tofu, which came with a sauce that was similar to agedashi sauce, only with more spring onion and something else in it. Never really had thin slices of fried tofu rather than cubes of tofu in a restaurant before, but what the hell, it was tasty.

My dol bibimbap (beef, vegetables and rice with an egg cracked on top in a hot pot) was really tasty, and very spicey, at first the waitress only mixed in some of the sauce, but I gave in and mixed the rest in half way through.

Somebody couldn’t eat all of his way through the chicken wings, they arrived on a sharing platter so I’m guessing they weren’t meant for one person, but I was too full to help out other than taking a nibble at one to see how they tasted. They looked pretty funky but tasted really crispy on the outside and the meat was still really tender.

The negatives? No Korean music on the second visit, all American pop trash… and my Jasmine tea was made from a bag which is always a bit of a let down, but I’ll live, maybe.