Matsuri, Mid City Place, 71 High Holborn, London WC1 (020 7430 1970). Dinner for two, including wine and service, £100
Cheap Japanese food is a little like masturbation; it's a reasonable way to pass the time and it won't damage your health, but it's no replacement for the real thing. To stretch this metaphor until it snaps, the real thing can also rob you of innocence. For example, I used to be quite keen on the bright lights and beat music of the Yo! Sushi chain, which in some gastronomic circles is worse than admitting you are rather partial to a Burger King bacon double Swiss (which I am, as a matter of fact. So shoot me). The little conveyor belts at Yo! appealed to the propeller-head gizmo-fetishist in me, I liked being able to lift from it what I wanted when I wanted, and I thought some of the dishes - the dinky bowls of chicken teriyaki, a couple of the sushi - were pretty good.
Then I went to the new branch of Matsuri on London's High Holborn. There are no conveyor belts at Matsuri. You can not help yourself. And nobody will play garage sounds at you until your jaw vibrates. It is about as far from Yo's notion of democratic eating as, ooh, George Bush's ascendancy to the US presidency was from an election. As a result, I will now find it very hard to lift anything off a Yo! Sushi conveyor belt ever again. At Matsuri the staff bow to you when you arrive. Rather a lot. I think they are probably just congratulating you on your good taste for being there.
In the age of fusion and new restaurants with enigmatic names like Zuma and Sumosan which attempt, with varying degrees of success, to reinvent the Japanese wheel, it is all too easy to forget just how very good the real, unfused thing is. It is balanced, light and, most importantly, delicious; a virtuoso display of umami, that 'savouriness' found in miso, now recognised as the fifth taste. This is what Matsuri offers, if at a price. But when you have sampled each one of the seven courses in the Nebuta set meal and been attended to by your own knife-spinning Teppanyaki chef and been bowed to a bit more, it will feel worth it.
If Matsuri has a downside, it is the look of the place. The ground floor area, which houses the sushi bar and the general restaurant tables, basks in the kind of bright, unforgiving white light depressives use as therapy to get them through the winter months. Downstairs in the basement is the far more appealing Teppanyaki room: horse-shoe shaped tables seating up to eight, surrounding the Teppanyaki sizzling plate at which your chef will perform.
There are four set Teppanyaki meals, the most expensive one being the nine-course Gion, costing £55 a head, but the benefits over our £30 Nebuta seem relatively slight. We began with tiny bowls of what I took to be shredded cabbage, that had been long marinated in a light, sweet soy. Next came dobinmushi, a clear and intense soup served from a dainty ceramic teapot which held prawns and pieces of chicken and mushroom. Salmon tartar, so fresh it could probably have told you where it was swimming yesterday, came in the form of a tian on a thick, sweet mustard sauce. Kushiage - breaded, deep fried pieces of, in this case, prawn, squid and aubergine - were light and greaseless.
And then a slightly ho hum green salad, served less as a course and more as a stopgap while our Teppanyaki chef did his thing with crisp raw vegetables, a chicken breast and a fillet of salmon. Our chap, the only non-Japanese chef we saw, was possibly a little more of a card than was strictly necessary; the boy had patter and, by god, he was going to use it. But then you don't argue with a man who can do those sorts of tricks with very, very sharp knives. The salmon he produced - seared outside, uncooked within, like the best tuna - was one of those revelatory dishes. We have become hideously inured to over-cooked salmon, as if it were something we deserved. This was the real thing. Teriyaki chicken was appropriately sweet and sticky. There was, of course, rice, both fried and not, miso soup, pickles and then, to finish, glasses of crisp, airy lemon and raspberry sorbet.
Because I am committed to my job, I also tried some of their sushi - a speciality - which was terrific, the slivers of salmon and bream almost worryingly fresh, the rice just warm and sticky. Excluding that sushi and with a bottle of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc the bill would have been £100 for two. And yes, it's a lot of money. But you know what: quality costs.
