Telephone: 020 8200 1189
Address: Noto Sushi, Oriental City, 399 Edgware Road, Colindale, London NW9.
Lunch for two costs £30, if you try really hard.
What can I say about Colindale that has not already been said? That its hanging gardens are a wonder to behold and its rococo architecture a delight; that it has spawned many of the nation's dreamers and provided inspiration for its artists and poets. Colindale: Edgware's Latin Quarter. There. None of that has been said before. Mind you, it's all complete cobblers, which probably explains why. There's nothing wrong with Colindale. It's just that, were you to flick through the guidebooks in search of a good day out, you would find the chapter detailing thrilling things to do in Colindale on the short side. There's the British Museum's newspaper library. It's not far from Stanmore. Er, that's it. Colindale is the suburbs in spades. It's on the edge but not at all edgy.
Curiously, it is that very suburbanness, that utilitarian city blandness which detaches Colindale from the London of which it is a part, which makes it the perfect location for Noto Sushi. You want to eat good sushi in a place that is not noticeably British, and Colindale does the trick. It helps, of course, that this bar which serves nothing other than raw fish - no teriyaki, no tempura, no dumplings - should occupy a site in the middle of Oriental City, a large, no-frills shopping centre dedicated to the food and culture of the Far East. The place is as in-yer-face Asian as it can be and, while local office workers use its impressive food court at lunchtimes, there's no doubting that it is really designed for the expat Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indonesian communities. The rest of us are mere interlopers, though very welcome ones.
Noto sits off to one side of that food court, an elegant little shack with its own seats at its own marble bar beneath its own unnecessary roof of authentic Japanese ceramic tiles. Behind it is the cavernous Oriental supermarket, complete with a huge Japanese fishmonger's where you can buy the raw materials of the lunch just eaten. All the food is produced to order by Japanese chefs and is quite simply some of the best sushi I have ever eaten. For those of you who wanted to see me sentenced to eat at an Angus Steak House for the rest of my life for refusing to condemn the pricing at Ubon in my review a month or two back - my, how that made you cross - Noto also happens to be eye-poppingly good value.
I went with my brother Adam, a regular visitor to Japan who adores the food and who comes here to get a fix of what he swears is the real thing. I have no reason to doubt him. There's a long list of various nigiri and maki sushi as well as sashimi and hand rolls, all priced at between 90p and £2.80 per piece. There are also a number of set meals, and from these Adam chose the Tokujo-chirashi, at £15. It was one of the two most expensive dishes on the menu. (I had the other one.) Even so, the value was immense: a large bowl filled with chirashi rice, sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds and then layered with every kind of fish in the chilled counter. There was salmon and sweet prawn, surf clam and sea urchin, vinegared snapper and tiny orange fish roe. There was even some oily tuna, which sells for almost £70 a kilo up at the fishmonger's. It looked beautiful and, Adam said, it tasted terrific.
I went for the lunchtime special menu (also at £15), which laid down the kind of challenge I cannot resist: you may order anything you like from an extensive list which includes almost everything, bar the oily tuna. However, you may do so for only an hour and, if there is anything left over at the end of those 60 minutes, you must pay for it at the piece meal rate (so to speak). It is, depending on your view, either an incentive to over-eat or an incentive not to over-order. It gave me the opportunity to order four pieces of one of my passions, grilled eel, tied to the rice with a ribbon of seaweed and glistening with a slick of sweet, soy-based sauce.
What distinguishes the sushi here - the tuna and salmon, scallop and clam and snapper, all of which I tried - is not just the glorious freshness of the fish but the rice. All too often the rice in British-bought sushi, particularly the stuff found in those pre-packed supermarket containers, is in a cold, solid lump. Here it is just warm, and the grains are almost separate, yet clinging to each other as if for company. A maki roll becomes a set of distinct textures as your teeth first break through the taut membrane of the seaweed, then find the yielding rice and finally hit the soft fish at the centre. The spicy tuna rolls, the fish glazed with a light salty chilli sauce, were particularly good.
It was almost revelatory and, as I say, heroically good value. You would find out how good if you went to Harrods, where Noto has a similar stand. There the chirashi costs a whopping £39. A piece of oily tuna sushi costs £3.50 instead of £2, and scallops cost £2.50 instead of £1.40. Doubtless that is Harrods taking its cut rather than Noto inflating its prices. In my book, it simply makes Colindale far sexier a destination than Knightsbridge could ever be.
Contact Jay Rayner on issuejay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
