The pandemic is obviously not having too much of an impact on new restaurant openings in Hong Kong. New restaurants continue to roll in and earlier this month, Soil to Soul (土生花) joins a number of other new additions to the local dining scene. To be honest, I have never been a big fan of vegetarian food my whole life. So, Soil to Soul, a contemporary Korean vegetarian restaurant at K11 Musea, wasn’t supposed to get much of my love but since I am such a faithful fan of Korean culture (and I miss Seoul so much during COVID-19), I wasn’t going to let this get away from me.
From different social media sites, Soil to Soul is portrayed as a restaurant specializing in Korean temple cuisine. Whatever it means, let’s find out! In fact, I have gathered a few others including mom, who’s an expert in vegetarian food to tag along on this culinary journey.
Judging from the interior décor, this looks more like a modern fine dining restaurant than a Korean vegetarian restaurant.
Soil to Soil only offers a set lunch menu on top of a pretty short a la carte menu with only 2-4 choices from each section (starter, snack and main course). I decided to exhaust every combination to make sure that we get to try out each and every dish on the menu.
Lunch started off with something called a “revitalized” soup served with a small salad.
This tasted a lot like lukewarm butternut squash soup.
Garden green with vinaigrette dressing.
Some kind of root vegetable on top of a pile of white kimchi.
Next up was our starter. The sweet and spicy mushroom with assorted vegetables were very, shall we say, Chinese. Almost like sweet and sour pork with some extra spicy kick.
Grilled king oysters - The least successful starter of the four.
Burlock and tofu with king oyster mushroom - I am a sucker for burlock so this was probably my favorite starter of the four. Not surprisingly, it's a dish featured in almost every poster and front page of the menu. So, it’s safe to assume it’s a signature dish around here.
Blessed tofu skin pocket stuffed with sweet potato noodle, napa cabbage – A “lucky bag” made with tofu skin. This was pretty tasty thanks to the tangy broth on the bottom.
The braised daikon was really nice too. This and the burlock tofu were easily the best starters of the afternoon.
Five veggie rice, BibimBap – Korean mixed rice with five types of vegetables.
I didn’t jot down every single one of the ingredients but I recall having black fungus, spinach, cucumber and there were a couple others in there. Not bad.
Korean fried rice – In my opinion, this was way better than the BibimBap. The diced vegetables really provided some lovely crunch to the rice, which was finished off nicely by the savory kick of the seaweed.
All of our main course came with a vegetable broth. At this point, everyone was getting a little scared of vegetables and mushrooms!
Dessert was a cake made with Korean rice cake. I thought it tasted more like a rectangular dough than a gourmet cake but what do I know about Korean temple cuisine, right?
I thought this was a very interesting experience to say the least. Before this meal, I could never imagine what Korean temple cuisine was all about but this has given me a glimpse of what it would be like to be a vegetarian growing up in Korea.
Address: Shop 704, 7/F, K11 Musea, Victoria Dockside, 18 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2389-9588
Opening Hours: 12:00pm - 11:00pm daily
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