Telephone: 020-7978 1610
Address: 1-7 Voltaire Road, London SW4
Rating: 15.5/20
'The 100-year wave," explained Philomena, "in fact occurs rather more frequently than that. It involves an unusual conjunction of wind and tidal conditions and is thought to be responsible for..."
"Is it?" I said, rather more shortly than I intended, but I feared that she was going to witter on at such length that we would never get around to ordering food. This scholarly monologue had been triggered by the fact that the restaurant in which we were sitting was called Tsunami, and tsunami, as I am sure you all know, means tidal wave in Japanese.
Not that all tsunamis are 100-year waves, and not that Tsunami is a Japanese restaurant, at least in the conventional sense of the word. It's Japanese in the sense that Nobu is Japanese - it uses some of the concepts of Japanese cooking in the form of sushi, sashimi and tempura, but from there on in it's a westernised gloss on japonaiserie, sharpened and polished, and brought into line with cosmopolitan metropolitan tastes.
There is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, in a dark backwater off Clapham High Street, there is a lot that is very right with it. I can think of plenty of other dark corners of London, and elsewhere for that matter, that would be brightened by the presence of a Tsunami.
The echoes of Nobu are not entirely surprising, given the fact that the two proprietors and the chef all worked there at one time or another. However, it would be wrong to see Tsunami as just a Nobu clone. The service is graceful, assiduous, charming, and disarmingly anxious to please, rather than professionally chirpy and smoothly professional. And, while there is a Pawsonesque minimalism about the room, it doesn't have the design éclat of the restaurant at the Met. You don't get the feeling of a culture clash between the lean, clean lines of the decorative structure and the bulky, bulbous bodies of the people who eat there.
Indeed, Tsunami has the friendly, casual air of a neighbourhood restaurant. The night that Philomena and I ate, it was crowded with customers who represented a fair cross-section of well-to-do Claphamites in terms of age, sex and ethnic background.
Although some of the cooking demonstrated that there is a distinctive personality at work in the kitchen, the food, perhaps inevitably, bears a generic similarity to that of the Great Original, and in the cases of certain dishes on the menu- cod in sweet miso sauce, to name but one - not just a generic similarity.
In the past, I have been less than charitable about Nobu. It's not that I didn't recognise it as a classy restaurant, or think that the Japanese fusion food was bad (except in the case of Ubon, Nobu-on-Thames), simply that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I seem to be in a minority of one in this.
I still hold to this view, although Philomena and I enjoyed a good many of the dishes at Tsunami: the sautéed foie gras with sautéed Asian pear and truffle sauce; the quail with ginger honey soy; the freshwater eel nigiri sushi; the cod in sweet miso; and the puddings - chocolate harumaki with sesame seed ice cream and the more ordinary chocolate fondant with green tea ice cream. In each of these, the primary flavours were well-defined, and the saucing exemplary. The hot foie gras and the freshwater eel sushi, in particular, were terrific dishes.
Less successful, in our view, were butternut ebi with creamy curry sauce, which turned out to be prawns wrapped in what appeared to be Shredded Wheat, topped with a frizz of dentally-resistant red pubic hair, which turned out to be butternut squash, and surrounded with blobs of rather indeterminate sauce; and the mint tea duck with plum and honey miso - both were plain dull.
A couple of other sushi items were uninspiring, and there was a brace of oysters, too, all dressed up in bits and pieces, which were perfectly decent, very nice, in fact, but certainly no more remarkable than they would have been with a splash of Tabasco and a squeeze of lemon.
The bill of £91.80 reflected our questing spirit rather than a predatory pricing policy. Indeed, most of the appetisers are priced around the £4-£6 mark, the sushi comes in at between £1.20 and £1.70 per bite-sized item, and main courses top off at £12.95. Even the top-priced bento box is only £16.50. These are well in keeping with Tsunami's position as a smart neighbourhood restaurant, and good value in relation to the overall quality.
However, I got the feeling that, successful though Tsunami clearly already is, it is still a restaurant that is groping its way towards its own clear-cut identity, and it still needs to do a bit of work on its wine list to bring it up to speed with the menu. It'll probably be there in another 12 months. In the meantime, youthful passion and energy propel it along with zip and charm.
· Open all week, dinner only, Mon-Fri, 6-11pm; Sat, 5-11pm, Sun, 5-10.30pm. All major credit cards. Menus: Bento boxes, £10.50-£16.50; kids' bentos £6.
