Rating: 7/10
Telephone: 020-8896 3175
Address: 1 Station Parade, Uxbridge Road, London W5
Open: Tues-Sun, lunch, 11am-1.30pm; dinner, 4.30- 9pm
Price: £15-£20 a head with a beer or small jug of sake
Some restaurants expend a great deal of money and effort on their exteriors to entice passing trade, and others couldn't care less, but never until Sushi Hiro had I encountered one seemingly designed with the express ambition of scaring customers away.
On first spotting the grubby, frosted-glass frontage of this determinedly dreary place, from the entrance to the tube station opposite, I assumed one of two things: either the restaurant had closed in the 24 hours since I'd booked the table, or the front must itself be a front for something else - a money-laundering outfit, perhaps, or one of those Albanian sex slave prisons we are led to believe festoon such genteel London suburbs as Ealing.
The truth that became clear once I'd nervously pushed open the door was far more startling. Sushi Hiro, it transpired, is a restaurant specialising in sushi, and nothing more nor less than that. For such fripperies as decor and service it has no time, but then it doesn't have much time for lunchtime punters either, opening at 11am and even more eccentrically closing at 1.30pm.
Sitting there waiting for two friends, anxiously watching the clock (not that there is a clock, or much else on the off-white walls except a few hideous pictures of cats), resolutely not being offered a drink by a heroically unsmiling waitress, it struck me that this would be the ideal venue for that pre-suicide last supper; and that if the special of the day were the deadly puffer fish (fugu) that, if wrongly prepared, can kill you in seconds, one could combine the meal and the suicide, and so avoid the potential humiliation of noticing too late the sign that reads "Cash only".
Then my friends showed up, and we speculated morosely as to whether Sushi Hiro has a sister restaurant called Sushi Hito, and if so whether it, too, is presided over by someone who makes the pre-coup attempt Gordon Brown look like Kriss Akabusi hitting top form in the latter stages of a televised grinning contest.
When a request for a bowl of miso soup was rejected on the grounds that the soup, although free, cannot be served on its own, the spirits dropped another notch. And so, lunch not having necessarily developed to our advantage, we surrendered to an examination of the menu - and things began to look up. There are moments when you just know, from the absolute, purist disdain for every other aspect of running a restaurant, that the food will be great, and so it proved.
The soup is the only hot thing available, the choice being limited to individual sushi and collations of sashimi, nigiri and chirashi, served with the usual accompaniments of wasabi, soy and pickled ginger, and all at the ultra-reasonable prices you can afford to charge when the overheads aren't exactly crippling. We ordered just about everything, and without exception it was superb.
Writing about sushi is always a slight struggle, since generally reporting either that they made you ill or that they didn't is as far as it seems sensible to go. Here, however, it was instantly clear that we were in the presence of the freshest and most beautifully prepared raw fish any of us has eaten (including in Japan).
Of the individual sushi, the pick was a piece of that underrated omega 3 champ the mackerel, but the tuna was immaculate, too. The deluxe chirashi was a large bowl of perfect sushi rice topped with seaweed, egg and various delectable seafood "chosen by the chef", while the "superior nigiri" more than lived up to its adjective. Ten different piscine life forms came on a wooden chopping board, all of them bursting with zing (if anyone has a better synonym for "incredibly fresh", email at once), and among them such top of the range items as sea bass, turbot, sea bream and the sweetest of crab. Mixed sashimi was terrific, too, for identical reasons.
Describing this restaurant as hyper-utilitarian would imply a level of luxuriance to which it does not aspire, and it will by no means be to all tastes. However, anyone with a genuine passion for raw fish and the gumption to step beyond the unpromising facade will find Sushi Hiro a glimmering Aladdin's cave.
