Mien Korean Style Chinese Restaurant

VGirl is a bit obsessed with Runcorn Plaza at the moment. Every time we go out she wants to go to either here or across the road at Warrigal Square. The shops look a bit old but there have been a lot of new restaurants added recently, all of which seem to have a fair bit of people going. She's 100% sure that with enough promotion this could become the new Market Square. So for the last few weeks, we've been going here for dinner and VGirl has been encouraging her friends to do the same. I suppose this starts the first of my series on Runcorn Plaza/Warrigal Square!

This place!

VGirl and I decided to go to Mien due to her hankering for Korean food. They have a large menu but its mostly in Korean and its not very descriptive to say the least.

You can't really see it in this picture, but they have daily specials where a particular dish is discounted by a few dollars. The day we went the egg fried rice and black bean sauce was on special for $9 I think.

Oooh daily deals

Here is our cute little cutlery! I always think its interesting how long Korean spoons are.

Cute bowl though

The banchan we received were acid yellow and crisp daikon pickles. They were quite crunchy but not very sour.

So yellow

We ordered three dishes, two from what we presumed was the vegetarian section and one for myself. The first dish to arrive was the sweet chilli tofu. The tofu used was super soft and it had lots of garlic chives, garlic, onion, zucchini and carrot. VGirl was also surprised to note that there were pork mince pieces in this dish, this wasn't indicated on the menu at all so we picked through the lot and kept finding the occasional pork mince piece. The flavour was mildly spicy and not as sweet as I thought it would be considering how sweet a lot of Brisbane Korean food is, it was more along the lines of a very mild mapo tofu.

Surprise meat!

VGirl was very excited that the plain egg fried rice and black bean sauce was the special of the day. She said that she would've felt bad ordering such a plain dish but since it was the special, why not? The fried rice was excellent, each grain individually fluffy, separated and perfectly cooked, strips of egg, carrot, onion and spring onion dotted the fried rice. She also enjoyed the sweetness and saltiness of the black bean sauce that appeared on the side, while I lambasted the huge amounts of onion present, she heartily enjoyed it. That is until she found a piece of pork in her meal! We found a few more pieces after that and she lamented that she knew the sauce was too tasty to be true!

Delicious~

We received a bowl of plain broth as well, with some pieces of vegetables that I can't remember at the bottom. I remember it having a good flavour but nothing too spectacular.

Drinkable!

I ordered the spicy pork and seafood black bean spaghetti or jjangmyeon! It's a classic Korean dish that a lot of Korean people would enjoy in their younger days due to the versatility of the dish and its appealing appearance. The sauce is a dark brown/black, super thick and flavoured with lots of onion, pork pieces, tiny squid and octopus present as well. The majority of the sauce was onions though which I thought was disappointing but it was still quite delicious, it had a noticeable hot chilli flake burn that numbed the mouth. The noodle were quite thick wheat noodles that had a nice chewy texture, apparently they make all their noodles on site!

We got an entree of vegetarian spring rolls that was the last dish to appear. I had to commend the super retro garnish of iceberg lettuce and hot pink Thousand Island dressing though, its probably not intentionally hipster chic but its an interesting touch. The spring rolls themselves were quite ordinary, full mostly with cabbage and carrot, they lack seasoning and were quite heavily saturated in oil.

Meh

As you can see, we didn't finish our dishes. We got takeaway containers and gave them to Shishi, he said the sauce on the black bean noodles was delicious but agreed that it was so hot that his mouth went numb!

Leftovers

So many

Mien Korean Style Chinese Restaurant
Atmosphere: 6, busy little Asian restaurant. Lots of laminated signs up, gotta love your classic laminated menus in two languages and a list of specials that don't actually appear on the menu!
Service: 5, pretty average. The girl who spoke to us had quite poor English and wasn't able to understand a lot that VGirl was saying to her.
Food: 5, the food is okay, it's quite cheap, it has large portions and it has a fair amount of substance to it. I think it would be great student fair but its nothing special really. It's a shame that their food isn't clearly marked and that there seems to be so much onion in everything.