Truth is sometimes found in unexpected places. In the case of Seoul City, it's in the complimentary dish of kimchi the server drops off at your table moments after your arrival.

As anyone who has spent more than 24 minutes on Bloor Street west of Bathurst knows, kimchi is the traditional Korean dish of vegetables - usually cabbage - made with fermented chili peppers. Good kimchi attacks your olfactory receptors in the same way they are attacked when you walk past a garbage chute in a very old Brooklyn apartment building on a sweltering summer day. Kimchi, to the uninitiated, should be a test of the eater's mettle.

And the uninitiated seem to be exactly the type of crowd Seoul City is targeting. You can see it in that free kimchi. The first bite elicits no sinus prickling, no eye watering, no memories of garbage chutes of yore. The cabbage is gently pickled, sitting in a clear pinkish brine, rather than a pool of red pungent ooze.

Seoul City, then, is Korean food with training wheels, and the decor follows the same pattern of likeable innocuousness. The aesthetic environment firmly tells you you're on Queen Street West: smooth curves, walls made of little nacreous purple tiles, a flat-screen television that scrolls through glamour shots of the food on the menu.

And while the food might be a touch unadventurous, it is nevertheless competently prepared and artfully plated. Five pan-fried dumplings ($8), hand-crimped, are delicately stuffed with minced pork mixed with fresh watercress and thin skeins of more of that kimchi, which, in this case, provides a pleasant salty tang to the mixture. Vegetarian dumplings ($6) are filled with shiitake mushrooms, carrots, tofu and kimchi (again), bathing in a light, clean daikon leek broth.

A plate of Korean pancakes ($9) - wide, flat rounds studded with green onions and crispy around the edges - are crowned with folded moist slices of house-cured salmon and blobbed with a healthy dollop of crème fraîche. The pancakes, though simple, are surprisingly good, but they don't quite work with the salmon, a fish that is oily enough on its own without competing with a trio of fried discs.

The speed at which the entrees arrive is impressive, the best of the list being a superb order of kalbi ($16), sweetly marinated grilled beef short ribs, large and shiny. They are served simply, in a stack, next to a small puck of slightly gluey white rice and steamed baby bok choy. Our table was left gnawing on the bones and sucking on our marinade-slicked fingers.

Chef Jonathan Leung's take on bi bim bap sees the rice replaced with orzo ($10), eliminates the fried egg, and is stirred with julienned zucchini and carrots, enoki mushrooms and pea sprouts. The dish is not bad, but it is intended for cowards. If you have a coward's palate, this is the dish for you. Same with the panko-crusted soft shell crab in spicy kimchi sauce ($15). Technically, there is nothing wrong with the preparation, but you would be foolish to expect culinary fireworks from what's really the Asian seafood version of chicken fingers.

Seoul City might not be channelling the true soul of that city, but what it's doing seems to be appropriate for a specific area of this city. And that's just fine.