I agree with Anthony Bourdain on a great many things, among them that food tastes better when you’re not wearing shoes. While he goes on to sing the praises of feeling the beach below your feet, at Eldar’s Kitchen, the Federal Way restaurant where I sat down to a plate of khinkali in my socks, the grains on the floor were more of the wood variety than sand.

Eldar’s Kitchen sits on the top floor of Palace Spa, a co-ed Korean-style collection of hot pools, cold plunges, saunas, steam rooms, and more. After working up an appetite alternating through the healing properties of the ice, clay, salt, and jewel rooms, spa-goers can pad upstairs in the scrub-like outfit Palace supplies for the mixed-gender areas and sit down to a meal of specialties from around the former Soviet Union.

The Western European and American idea of spa food embraces the aesthetics of haute cuisine with the ascetics of Lean Cuisine. Khinkali, the thick-skinned steamed dumplings from Georgia (the country, not the state), with their meaty filling and rich broth, represent the opposite. Wellness comes as comfort here, rather than deprivation, in the form of Uzbek samsa buns and fizzy cans of dark rye kvass.

While I love a Korean spa, this time I arrived with only skewers of shashlik and pillows of piroshki on my mind. The front desk pointed me toward a staircase along the north side of the building. Entering by the busy kitchen, my friend and I found our way into a mostly unfurnished living room–like area, with a far too small shoe rack in the near corner.

The bare floors, unadorned tables, and counter-service felt at odds with even the Korean idea of a spa. It felt more in line with the kind of place where it turns out they are out of half the menu items at all times (they were, at this time) and where the staff visibly relax when a customer speaks to them in their own language (as our server did when my friend spoke to her in Russian).

There is a slight oddness to everything at Eldar’s Kitchen: the Russian restaurant inside a Korean spa, the harsh lighting in such a relaxing place, that half the customers are wearing the shapeless scrubs of the spa, and nobody is wearing shoes. The menu is a jumble of Uzbek pastries, Georgian dumplings, and Russian classics, plus generic restaurant items that seem to have little to do with the restaurant’s genre, nor with the dish name itself, judging from the caesar salad I saw land on a neighboring table.

None of those mattered: The sweetness of bright green tarragon soda smoothed over any rough edges. The savory steam escaping from the buttery greens inside the bun of my cabbage piroshki was a spa experience on its own, a facial dipped in dilly sour cream. As I slurped the silky soup inside the gentle folds of my khinkali, I came to a conclusion I should have reached after so many rounds of mandu at the restaurants inside the area’s other Korean spas: Dumplings are the perfect spa food.