Telephone: 020 7978 1610
Address: Tsunami, 1-7 Voltaire Road, London SW4.
Dinner for two, including service, £60.
Let me be straight: we did not need to spend £117 at Tsunami. Nor would you. A fully satisfying meal at this new Japanese-fusion place in Clapham, south London, could easily come in at £60 for two. I'm sure a moderately low-alcohol, low-intensity lunch would set you back no more than £40. That I and my companion spent nearly three times that amount is testament to just one thing: our greed. No, make that two things: our greed and the fact that the food at Tsunami is so spectacularly good, so perfectly executed, it seemed almost a sin not to give the menu a proper seeing-to. True, we didn't need the third starter. We probably didn't need all the sushi or the five orders of tempura and Robert certainly didn't need those two puddings. But where restaurant eating is concerned, what has need ever had to do with it?
One of the reasons we were able to go through the menu like this is the very nature of Japanese food: even with the flirtations with other food styles that are going on here, the food remains, essentially, a combination of the carbohydrates in rice and the proteins in fish. The cloying fat content is exceptionally low, and any fish oils one ends up consuming are all thoroughly good ones. In other words, there is something about Japanese food that feels incredibly virtuous and healthy while, at the same time, being curiously hedonistic. It is, I think, the ultimate culinary win-win.
Part of the pleasure of Tsunami is its hidden location: it sits down a dank, grey afterthought of a road in Clapham's cheaper seats with a fabulously bleak view of the railway tracks. Then you walk through the door and find yourself in an airy and clean space of white walls and simple wooden tables. To one side is the half-open kitchen. We took a table facing it so that we could watch sushi chef Singi Nakamura at work. With his neatly cropped beard and the peroxide streak in his hair, Nakamura looks like a matinée idol who just happens to be slumming it here for the night.
That he has worked both at Nobu and its little brother, Ubon, is obvious from the menu. The staples are here. There are long lists of sushi, sashimi and tempura as well as things like rice and miso. But it is the other dishes which demand one's attention. From the list of starters, all priced at around £5, we began with what was called, deliciously, mint tea duck. The meat was pink, lean and sliced so thinly that we wondered whether it had at one point been frozen, so as to make such dainty knife-work possible. If so, it didn't interfere with the flavour, which was slightly gamey. It came interleaved with crisp slices of pear and dressed with a sweet honey miso sauce. Fabulous. Sunkiss salmon was delicate lozenges of cooked fish, dressed with a sparky mixture of soy and lime juice. Butternut ebi - prawns wrapped in the shredded-wheat-like Greek pastry and topped with crispy shredded butternut squash - was the least successful of the three. The butternut squash simply became chewy when deep-fried.
From the main courses, we chose a speciality of the house: seafood ju-ban yaki. The fish and a few vegetables are placed on a searingly hot plate, on to which is poured mirin wine which is set aflame. Then the whole is covered tightly to cook. The fish was succulent and the broth, mixed with a little soy, I think, startlingly aromatic. Another main course, hira unagi, brought a substantial portion of savoury glazed grilled eel on rice for £8.95.
All the sushis that we tried were perfect, particularly the melting slices of scallop and the bright orange smelt eggs. At around £3 for two pieces, they were also good value. As to the tempura, it was not the lightest batter we have tried, but it was pretty good. I finished with a green-tea tiramisu, the essence of the tea adding a light but tannic end to the cream, as if I had just drunk a big red wine. It worked well as a palate-cleanser. Robert's green-tea ice-cream was similar. His white sesame ice-cream, however, was so outrageously rich and nutty it may have to be declared illegal.
Service was calm and efficient, particularly given that it has only just opened. As we were leaving, I saw people receiving the dishes we had eaten and I found myself jealous at the pleasure they had to come. That has to be a good sign.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
