M Pocha — Restaurant in Durham

I was not impressed by this restaurant. Let's start off with the positives.

The shrimp toast was AMAZING! compliments to the chef on that one. If the price point was more reasonable, I would come everyday just for that food item. $17 for 4 small pieces of shrimp toast is absurd!! Additionally, the cocktails were nice and strong!

My friend ordered the drunken noodles and her noodles were undercooked.

I think the sides are over priced. Especially the kimchi! The kimchi costs five dollars and the portion size was no bigger than the palm of a child's hand.

Now onto the thing that I really didn't enjoy about this restaurant. When my friend and I arrived, we did not have a reservation. It was 4pm. As we approach the hostess stand she asked us if we had a reservation and we said no. she quickly told us that we had to leave within the next forty minutes in order to sit and be served due to other reservations. Her delivery was rude and curt. Keep in mind there was only one other party in the entire restaurant when we arrived. I'm not sure where her attitude came from, as far as them being busy and not having space to service us.

When we were seated, I decided to move the candle that she placed in front of me because I didn't want it to be so close to my purse. It was a open flame. Literally 5 seconds later the hostess comes over, Moves the candle back towards my bag and tells me to leave it there because of whatever reason. I explained to her why I moved the candle but she did not care the listen.

Overall I think I will not be returning to this restaurant. The service was not good and the prices were extremely high for the quality and quantity of food...

Ambiance. The place is small and quaint with very little money invested into the interior.

Service. The waiter greeted us in a reasonable timeframe, I believe his name was Ben. The service was great! He informed us that the dishes were meant to be shared so 3-4 dishes for 2 people. Ok.

Cocktails. We ordered 2 cocktails(Vesper & House of the rising sun) and after tax the total was +$40. We don't mind paying craft cocktail prices for craft cocktails but these were just so 1-note and boring. The high price point makes sense if you have a dedicated bartender making artful cocktails or your location has unique ambiance but without these factors it just feels overpriced.

App. We ordered the featured dish, mussels. It was a very interesting approach to mussels consisting of chorizo and Bleu cheese. The flavor were good but the mussle flavor profile was lost. It felt as if those ingredients could have been served on a anything else in the world and tasted the exact same.

Entree. The $48 meat plate was next. Flavors were fine but the portions were almost comically small. The galbi, pork, kimchi, and mushrooms all tasted good but it lacked the plate appeal, quantity and uniqueness required to warrant the price point. $30 would have made sense.

We ordered a couple other things - the fries and vegan dumplings were all good.

Korean Pochas are typically casual, I get that. But they are also usually inexpensive and delicious. It's a challenge to spend $150 at a real Pocha for 2 people. But here we did it and left hungry.

We will continue to dine at M sushi and M kokko but we will likely not give pocha another shot.

Value...

I spent a very pleasant evening there with 3 other people. The dinner was quite good and the service was fast. The place is very small which makes it cosy. So it was a very nice option to go for dinner.

However, the reason why I only give them 1star, is because when paying, they had some kind of problem with their machine which was not showing on their side, that the payment was done correctly (I used apple pay). So, the next day, I check my bank account and there were 2 payments debited. One including the tip, the second not. I called the restaurant and there was no response, so we wrote them an email from which I NEVER received a reply. I have tried to cancelled the payment through my bank, after 4 days waiting for their reply

A reply to my email could have meant a completely different review. I found their silence impolite. Including here my reply to the owner (07.Jan.23):

Hello Thank you for replying to my review. I sent an email through your website expressing the situation and requesting cancellation of the second payment. I know these things can happen, but not receiving a response to my email is what left me wondering.

If you could share with me a working email address where I can send you a screenshot of the payments charged in order to get reimbursed for the extra payment.

My bank still shows both payments and I have been asked to contact the seller. I was in Durham for the holiday season and am living...