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Perhaps it was the contrast between the Arctic weather sweeping around Beetham Plaza that Saturday night and the cozy glow of the dining room, or the cheery welcome from the front desk, but I have rarely had my expectations of a meal turned around so dramatically by just walking through a restaurant's front door. It's not that I wasn't expecting much of Etsu; it had been recommended and I wouldn't have been there at all had I not been mildly optimistic, but this was, after all, a Japanese restaurant in Liverpool. And while competition for Spanish and Chinese (not to mention British) joints has created the likes of Lunya, Yuet Ben and 60 Hope Street (all worth visiting), if your closest rival is a Yo! Sushi then you really don't have to try too hard to be the best.
But Etsu are trying, and trying bloody hard, and, more importantly, passing with flying colours. The service was the first indication this was an operation with heart and soul - front of house in Liverpool are known for their friendliness and enthusiasm, less so (it has to be said) for their knowledge of whatever it is they're serving. Here though, every item of every dish was explained in detail on request, and the traditional Scouse charm was matched with an efficiency I've not seen anywhere else in the city.
Which would have all meant nothing, of course, had the food not been up to scratch. But even the most humble of dishes we ordered, such as these house pickles, showed an attention to detail that punched far above the very reasonable amount they were charging for it. It was all good, but some cabbage was my favourite, perfectly balanced between sweet and sour with just a hint of kimchi-like fermentation.
Sashimi, whilst having the most potential for disaster, acquitted itself perfectly well. It's probably not their fault I had a slightly better selection at Roka a couple of days previously, but it's also worth pointing out that the selection at Roka was a very similar volume of food and cost £28. This cost £9.50.
Some scallop nigiri though were lovely, as were a couple of pieces of gunkan masago, involving capelin roe. I'm afraid there's no picture of those as they disappeared almost as soon as they were placed on the table, they were that good.
With the trend in London towards extreme specialisation, especially with Japanese restaurants (Koya for udon, Tonkotsu for ramen, Shiori for Kaiseki etc) it was a surprise at first - not to mention a slight worry - to see sashimi, katsu curry, udon and tempura all on the same menu. But the breadcrumbed chicken in curry sauce was at least as good as that you can get from Wasabi, and I happen to think the Wasabi katsu curry is pretty good. At least, it was before they saw fit to change the recipe and serve it in a weird TV dinner tray and douse the fried chicken with tamarind. Can I have my little hot cardboard pot of rice and fried chicken with curry sauce on the side back please?
Sorry, I digress. Yasai tempura udon was very well done, the noodles thick and meaty, the broth rich and comforting, and the bits of fried veg light enough to enjoy without a hint of grease-induced queasiness. In fact this was probably the most impressive dish of all, showcasing a number of different techniques on one plate and getting all of it as close to correct as makes no odds. Sashimi may "just" be fresh fish on a plate, but good bubbly tempura requires quite a bit of skill.
The fact we decided to squeeze in a final course of matcha doriyaki despite being quite full shows how much we didn't want the evening to end. It was worth every bit of the £5.45, moist and not too sweet, and like everything else was served with a smile.
And it's the service, I think, that I will remember most about Etsu. That seems harsh on the food, but I don't mean it to - everything we ordered ranged from good to excellent and was priced so low I wondered at first whether our bill was a mistake - but in a town where the most you can usually expect from your waiter or waitress is that they bring you what you order and don't accidentally break any of your limbs in the process, to interact with such enthusiastic, happy people over the course of a couple of hours was an absolute joy. And it's also the reason why, at this moment in time, Etsu may just be the best restaurant in Liverpool.
9/10
There's very few times I feel more self-consciously clueless about food than when I'm eating in a Japanese restaurant. Sure, learning the ingredients and preparations in any foreign culture can be a challenge - I'll die happy the day I can order dim sum and not feel like I'm playing a scratch card - but Japanese food is surely one of the most advanced and perfected cuisines on the planet, and comes in such a variety of guises learning even the basics can seem an impossible task.
For a start, there's rarely anything so straightforward as a "Japanese restaurant". Instead, there are udon bars, ramen bars, yakitori joints, sushi bars, okonomiyaki, kaiseki, Brazilian-fusion and probably a few others I'm yet to discover. The intense skill and focus needed to perfect each of these styles of food results in extreme specialisation, and anywhere brave enough to attempt more than a couple of them at once is setting themselves up for a fall.
If anyone can have a decent bash at a pan-Japanese restaurant though, it's a former Nobu head chef. Nobu, whatever you may think of their showy, A-list bait restaurants and eye-watering prices, always knew how to produce decent food, and Scott Hallsworth has worked in their kitchens in various glamorous locations all over the world for over a decade. The influence of the mothership doesn't just extend to the food, either - the vast basement space on Kingsway is nicely done, the gently spotlit black wood tables and cream banquettes giving a ever-so-slightly bland but familiar Mayfair vibe, and all front of house being very smart and smiley.
Miso soup was, well, Miso soup, but had a couple of shimeji mushrooms bobbing about in the broth to liven things up a bit. I quite liked that they didn't even offer the option of a spoon so I didn't feel too self-conscious loudly slurping it directly out of the bowl.
I'd ordered a single piece of otoro (fatty tuna) sashimi just to see how their raw skills were, and it wasn't bad, but nowhere near as good as the one from Sushi Tetsu a few months ago and just felt slightly less-than-perfectly-fresh. Also, despite sternly being informed on the menu that the sashimi was "not served with soy sauce", it arrived with, er, a little bowl of soy sauce and a specific instruction from the chef to dip the fish in it. Which was a bit odd.
The BBQ grill set, though, was just lovely. Skewers of soft sliced onions dipped in a powerful miso dressing, delicately boned chicken wings with a perfect crispy skin, a good dollop of powerfully-smoked aubergine salsa, and the most wonderfully cooked (if slightly underseasoned) lamb chops that were just so addictively tender I stripped them clean to the bone in seconds. The sesame-ponzu dressing was a great and time-tested match to the charcoal-crisped protein, and a blackened half of lemon topped it all off. The kind of food that, unless you were a vegetarian or had some other kind of eating disorder, you could not fail to appreciate.
Any criticisms, then, will be largely due to one thing - the prices. It is very easy to spend a lot of money in Wabi and not have a great deal to show for it, and I say that having enjoyed the food there very much indeed. With a (bitterly sharp, presumably a mistake of some kind - it tasted they'd forgotten to sweeten it) salad, some decent pickles and a bowl of rice my fairly modest lunch came to £27, and though I'd happily pay it again, Bincho Yakitori in Soho does better (and cheaper) skewers, Asakusa in Camden does better (and cheaper) sushi and although I didn't try their tempura if it's any better than Koya's I'll eat my kimono.
But for an area that's hardly blessed with great restaurants and for doing what it does with a good amount of style and flair, Wabi is worth a visit. Die-hard foodies will be put off by the very anti-2013 lack of extreme specialisation, but I can only see it getting better as the staff and kitchens bed in, and you'd have to be a real contrarian not to be won over by almost everything about the place. For better of for worse, it's Holborn's very own Nobu.
7/10
Wimbledon used to be the place that restaurants went to die. It's strange how the smartest areas of town seem to suffer from a dearth of decent eating options; look at Hampstead, for example, with its couple of half-assed gastropubs and a Gaucho Grill, or Knightsbridge & West Brompton where people go to see and be seen eating salad. You'd think that where the disposable income goes, good food would inevitably follow but the opposite seems to be the case; where times are hard, and incomes low, restaurants fall over each other to offer great value and a great time. In areas that they don't have to try to turn a profit, well, they don't.
Thank heavens, then, that Wimbledon finally has a restaurant worth the trek to SW19. I don't mean Sticks'n'Sushi of course, oh no - that wouldn't be worth anyone's Zone 3 Oystercard supplement. I mean the Lawn Bistro, up the hill in Wimbledon Village, which opened a few months ago and is serving classy, starry dishes for a very reasonable amount of money and which I enjoyed very much. I may one day get around to reviewing it, but in the meantime Hugh Wright has, as usual, said everything worth saying about the place on his blog and I urge you to go read it.
Anyway, to Sticks'n'Sushi. The ninth in a chain, though the first in London (all previous branches are in Copenhagen), it presumably has plans to expand even further so quite why they've chosen Wimbledon for their flagship is unclear. Perhaps it has something to do with the huge space required for their "concept" - a massive open kitchen consisting of rows of gleaming workstations and looking like the set of Iron Chef. It's certainly impressive, and the rest of the room is attractive in a sort of chainy way even if it did remind me rather disturbingly of the inside of Fire & Stone in Covent Garden.
But my heart sank when I saw the "menu". Rather than have anything so pedestrian as a sheet of paper with available dishes listed on it, Sticks'n'Sushi prefers you rifle through a glossy catalogue of artfully photographed seafood, with barely more than a couple of dishes per double-page for extra annoyance, and the odd box of smug 'sustainability' guff. Even more incredibly, there are two of these catalogues, one containing A La Carte and the other a number of suggested "meals" with irritating names like "Salmon, duck and his friends" and "Mixed emotions". It's almost impossible to settle upon anything though because by the time you've reached the last page of this Littlewoods Catalogue of Food you've completely forgotten what came first. It's pointless, and annoying, and so in a desperate attempt to cobble together some kind of variety between the two of us we ordered a few bits of sashimi and a few yakitori and hoped for the best.
The food, on the whole, wasn't all that bad. Some "blini" (not very Japanese I know, but they were a special suggested by our waiter and rather than to have to plough through that menu again we agreed to have them) were on the bland side but still had enough nice fresh fish and crab to be worth the effort. Sashimi (tuna, salmon and yellowfish) was nicely presented on a pile of ice but were only middling-quality as you can probably tell by the rather mean strips of fat in the salmon. And beef tataki threw some interesting textures together, and was particularly enjoyable dipped in the goma dressing it came with, but was fairly low quality cow.
Elsewhere, "ebi bites" (deep fried prawn things in batter) were soft and greasy and drowning in mayonnaise, tuna yakitori was overcooked to dry grey, and chicken tebasaki (wings) managed somehow to be bland despite being incredibly overseasoned. Nothing was hideous, or even inedible, and I can think of certain things I would even like to try again amongst the whole load of stuff that I certainly wouldn't, but overall this was mediocre Japanese food, all style and no substance, glossily presented but lacking heart.
Which is what you might expect from a chain, and it's still not the worst Japanese food I've eaten in London (Yo! Sushi has few rivals in that department), so why is there no chance of hell I'd ever go back to Sticks'n'Sushi? One reason and one reason only - the stupidly high prices. Our meal, with a couple of cocktails and a £20 half (half!) bottle of sake came to £112.16. Luckily for us (if not them), this was a PR invite, but this is about as much as you'd pay in Roka on Charlotte Street, where the flashy presentations are matched by real skill at the stove, or even at Sushi of Shiori where £50/head will buy you two hours in the company of London's most talented Japanese chef. It's cheaper than Umu perhaps, or Yashin, but for heaven's sake this is a chain with chain ambitions, not a boutique omakase sushi bar. It's simply not worth this amount of money.
But don't worry Wimbledon, you still have the Lawn Bistro. And don't worry the rest of London, because there's no need to travel to SW19 for good sushi, you can go to anywhere above as well as Asakusa in Mornington Crescent or Ten Ten Tei in Soho. And for great yakitori, as well as Roka there's the wonderful Bincho on Old Compton Street, which regularly offers a thrilling range of things on sticks for very little money indeed. I'm not sure what it says about the standard (and cost) of food available in Cophenhagen that SnS is so wildly popular over there, but we have no need for another mediocre Japanese chain over here thank you very much. One is more than enough.
4/10
I was invited to Sticks'n'Sushi
Senkai is the new name for Cocoon. I'm not sure what went wrong with Cocoon; by all accounts it was a very nice Japanese restaurant that boasted a proper sushi master and a fantastic West End location in a handsome Nash terrace overlooking Piccadilly Circus, but nobody ever went. Including me, in fact. It could have been the prices, perhaps it was the slight air of China Whites trashy glamour, perhaps through a combination of mysterious factors it just slipped off people's radars. There must be a myriad of complex and ethereal reasons why some decent restaurants flourish and others die a slow death; Cocoon was maybe just one of the unlucky ones.
But now, it's back and all spruced up with a revamped menu. And very good it is too, if (as with the previous incarnation) you can look past the vaguely Travelodge décor and aren't too put off by the fact that without too much effort the bill can sail past the £100 a head mark. But good food is rarely cheap, and I will happily eat my dinner in a portaloo if the service is as sparkling and the food as accomplished as the dishes we tried last night. After a plate of shishito peppers (kind of a Japanese padron pepper, in fact literally identical to padron peppers as far as I can tell) and a rather nice passionfruit-based cocktail in the bar called a Frozen Flower, we ordered a selection of items from across the three main sections of the menu - "Raw Bar", "Senkai Plates" and "Robata".
First to arrive was a very attractive maki selection of salmon, asparagus and crispy fried prawn, each fresh and bright and very easy to enjoy. The tempura prawn, in particular, was something I'd not seen in a maki roll before and was amazingly sweet with great texture contrasts. The best thing about the maki plate though was the house wasabi, which was thick and slimy (in a good way) and far removed from the cloying dry pastes you usually find in sushi selections. Still blew your head off, though.
I couldn't get enough of the Cured Wagyu beef. Sliced into delicate thin wafers and boasting a huge amount of rich beefy flavour (not to mention a generous marbling of white fat), it was moreish to the point of addictive, and all the more enjoyable for being something I'd not eaten before anywhere else. It was £16, admittedly, per portion but then this is Wagyu and there was certainly enough of it.
Salmon tataki dressed in something called wafu (vinegar and oil and who knows what else) were buttery and full of flavour, attractively sliced across the "grain" and neatly presented. And the final item from the "Raw Bar" menu were these scallops with crunchy ginger, one of the few raw scallop dishes I've had in recent years that has the balance sweet scallops and accompaniments (citrusy ponzu and earthy fried ginger) just right. Very nice.
From the "Senkai plates" we were nudged towards the Rock shrimp tempura with red chilli mayonnaise. "Like prawn popcorn" our waiter said, and he was quite right - the most delicate and fragile tempura casings around nuggets of sweet, warm crustacean and with a fresh chilli-spiked mayonnaise, they were, again, unusual (I hesitate to use the word "unique" although I've never seen them anywhere else) and very, very tasty.
Pork and Jerusalem artichoke gyoza looked and tasted the part, too, with that familiar mix of soft dumpling underneath and crispy fried top side.
From the "Robata" (grill), the first dish to arrive was a sliced rump of lamb, rather aggressively seasoned but of clearly high quality and perfectly cooked to juicy pink. I didn't detect much - in fact, any - of the advertised sansho (better known as Sichuan) peppercorns but maybe I'm just immune to the stuff now after too many dinners at Chilli Cool. And almost as an afterthought we ordered "Grilled corn with lime butter" and these turned out to be completely brilliant, creamy and caramely with a subtle note of lime and burned sugar.
There was only one dish I didn't enjoy and it was this sliced monkfish in teriyaki sauce. It was so strange with its mix of sweet teriyaki sauce and very (very) "fishy" fish that I'm afraid I panicked and told the waiter I thought it might be off. It wasn't, of course - it was just weird, but full credit for the staff for being embarrassingly polite and reassuring, even so far as having the chef come out with a piece of the raw (bright white and completely odour-free) monkfish fillet to prove their point. Still didn't much like it, though.
Monkfish aside, though, the food at Senkai is sensationally good, and furthermore, following my rant about bad service in Battersea last week, it was a delight to be back in a restaurant where everyone was polite without being obsequious, efficient without being harried, friendly without being matey. Front of house at Senkai were pretty much perfect, and made the evening all the more agreeable.
The catch, as ever, is the price. I could have gone a bit easier on the booze (story of my life) but between the two of us we had 5 glasses of wine and a cocktail (plus another side of roasted aubergine and a single course of mochi ice cream to share) and the bill came to £200. Which is a lot. In fact, let's face it, it's an awful lot of money despite all the food being very good and with top quality ingredients and taking into account the stellar service. So, in the end, although I can thoroughly recommend the experience at Senkai, whether or not it can be considered to be good value may be a job for someone not being gifted their meal on the back of a PR invite (which I was). I will say this though - for sheer flare, passion and charm, you can do little better for Japanese food in London. Cocoon is dead - long live Senkai.
8/10
I was invited to review Senkai
"Without Soy Sauce
but if you want to."
This bizarrely illiterate directive is spelled out in large neon lettering on the back wall of stylish, newish sushi joint Yashin in Kensington. A couple of issues immediately spring to mind. Firstly, what on earth have Yashin got against soy sauce? I can understand Chinese restaurants being proud to not use MSG in their food, or a burger joint advertising their use of never-frozen beef, but I can't imagine anyone thinking the fact they deliberately avoid soy, a relatively benign and pretty tasty condiment at the best of times, would really be a selling point. Secondly, why then qualify it with "but if you want to"? Do they mean "unless" you want to, which would be a rather weak climb-down but would at least make grammatical sense or do they literally mean it to sound so hostile - "well, go ahead and ask for soy, then, you awkward bastard, but we won't like it and may spit in your miso." Very weird.
Fortunately, despite being forced to stare at this illuminated act of literary aggression throughout the course of our meal, it turned out to be quite at odds with the attitude of the staff, who to a man were helpful, pleasant and so completely on the ball when it came to service we barely needed to look up from our dinner for one of them to immediately catch our eye. Admittedly, it's probably quite easy being attentive in a room with only 16-odd covers upstairs and almost as many staff milling around, but it still doesn't mean it's not appreciated. The ultra-dutiful service also makes sense in the context of the prices at Yashin, which start at nose-bleeding and swiftly head towards eyeball-bursting if you're not very careful. Thinking I was being sensible in ordering one of the cheapest sakes on the menu, £26 in fact bought me a measure of size of a small beer bottle - it was nice enough I suppose, but I find it very hard to enjoy any alcoholic beverage more expensive than vintage champagne that isn't, in fact, vintage champagne.
The food itself, too, very much continued the theme of playing fast and loose with the idea of value. Marinated oysters were prettily presented on dyed blue ice, with a powerful shallot dressing and crispy lotus root, but the two not particularly massive shellfish weren't really extraordinary enough to justify £5.60. Akedashi soup (£2.50) felt a bit more like a good deal, rich and colourful and very much suiting the ironic afternoon tea presentation.
I only have myself to blame for the £13.50 price tag associated with a dish of Wagyu Carpaccio with wasabi, but having had a rather disappointing Wagyu steak when seared on the Jospers at top steakhouse Goodman a few months back I wondered if the Japanese method would bring out more in this premium meat. I can't really say it did though - the dressing was rather straightforward, just notes of vinegar and sugar and white radish, and the beef itself tender but pretty bland. Perhaps I'm missing something.
Grouper Carpaccio with spicy yuzu (£7.90) was better, grouper having a great firm texture and plenty of fresh flavour, and yuzu turned out to be a great acidic compliment to the protein, albeit displaying nothing much approaching the description "spicy"; I was underwhelmed with the seafood salad with sweet potato though, which contained tasteless rubbery chunks of unseasoned seafood (some kind of clam I think, amongst other things).
Soft shell crab "salad" (more accurately described as "a soft shelled crab and a shed load of lettuce") boasted expertly fried crab with absolutely bags of seafood flavour, but was a fairly miserly portion for £8.40. At Mien Tay, my local Vietnamese, you get two of these for £7, and, ironically, a nice soy & chilli sauce to dip them in. Because actually, Yashin, sometimes I do want to.
And then, the centrepiece of the meal, the Omakase 8 sushi set. Yashin are unusual amongst sushi places, at least in London, for very briefly searing the top of the nigiri with a blowtorch before dressing and serving. This bit of theatre is exciting to watch, especially when, as we were on our visit, you're sat so close to the prep area there's a very real chance of getting your eyebrows singed, but let's just consider this whole blowtorch business for a second. Sushi is raw fish, right? And nigiri is warm sushi rice with raw fish on top. And whether or not you prefer your fish raw or cooked, the fact is that there's a reason why sushi is served raw because cooking it fundamentally changes the way fish tastes. And if Yashin think they're improving the sushi by cooking it, then that means they think cooked fish tastes better than raw, which is, to say the least, a very odd attitude from a sushi restaurant. The omakase, by the way, was pretty nice - I particularly enjoyed some fatty tuna topped with a tiny flower petal and dab of truffle oil, and a salmon with lovely sharp ponzu jelly - but it wasn't anything above the standard of ingredients I enjoyed at Asakusa last year, and cost a frankly ludicrous £30.
I think you probably have the picture by now. If money was no object, if you are a connoisseur of fine sake and you like your nigiri cooked, you could easily find a lot to like at Yashin. In fact, plenty of people have, and it was with a mixture of surprise and regret that it slowly dawned on me I wasn't going to have quite the transcendental experience greater reviewers than me had spoken of. I should also say that my dining companion that night, a food blogger whose younger palate is probably not quite as battered as mine had a much better time and has already been two or three times. But if it was just up to me, I wouldn't go back to Yashin and to that extent I can't recommend it. It's perfectly nice, fresh food served at the kind of silly prices (our bill, with a couple of extra bits of sashimi, came to £161 for two) I can't see anyone but the guys who took our place at the bar after we'd gone, who parked their vintage Mercedes convertible just outside, being able to justify.
5/10
Pictures courtesy of Hollow Legs
