For all the lavish amounts of time, money, physical effort and neurosis that people pour into the opening of a restaurant, you'd have thought they would carve at least a few hours out of the frantic schedule to come up with a decent name. In any creative or commercial sphere, after all, the importance of the name can hardly be overstated.
I have never written a novel, for example, and doubtless never will, but what I have done is spend countless hours working on the name on the off-chance, eventually contriving a title of barely imaginable genius. "Have you read Matthew Norman's Booker-Nominated Modern Classic?" people would breathlessly inquire of each other. "No, what's it like?" "Och, don't ask - embarrassingly facetious cobblers from first page to last." Regardless of the reviews, the osmotic effect of hearing that name a few times would guarantee a bestseller.
I wish the chef-owner of a new-ish Japanese joint had shown the same dedication and imagination, because while there are scores of restaurants in central London that merit such a silly and off-puttingly pretentious name, the only one actually called Dinings may well be the one that deserves it least.
This is the sort of restaurant, in fact, with which you almost immediately fall in love, partly seduced by its lack of pomposity and incredibly warm welcome, but mostly because of the quality of food it serves at what are, by top-class Japanese standards, surprisingly low prices. The chef-proprietor, Tomonari Chiba, previously cooked at Nobu, but here in a narrow Marylebone town house he produces dishes of Nobu-esque quality at a third or less of the cost.
Having said that, this is by no means an elegant restaurant. Upstairs is a utilitarian sushi bar with a few stools, while downstairs the poky, dimly lit, low-ceilinged basement, with its stone floor and solitary window, and nothing more ornamental than the fusebox visible on a bare wall, initially strikes you as more ideally suited for use as an interrogation chamber. Yet the dearth of pomp and the smileyness of the waitresses swiftly coalesced with lashings of rice wine and some delicious starters to imbue the room with a weird, inverse sort of cosiness.
"Look, don't take offence," said my friend as we studied the lunch and evening menus and the specials blackboard, "but can we please avoid the sushi - I'm bored with sushi." Frankly, this came as a relief. There is nothing more irritating for the food writer than the futile battle of trying to dredge up original ways to describe raw fish, when all you can really say, at the risk of letting daylight in on magic, is: a) it made you ill; b) it didn't make you ill; or c) it was amazingly fresh.
About the nasu miso, on the other hand, I could write a novella, if not a Booker-Nominated Modern Classic. This absolute stunner of a starter comprised half a giant aubergine cooked to a wonderfully fleshy finish without quite disintegrating and glazed with a delicate soy paste to give it a sweet but tangy flavour that has my saliva glands in overdrive at the memory. Those endearing little protein-packed edamame pods were unusually good, assorted Japanese pickles were satisfyingly crunchy, and deep-fried tofu was crisp and greaseless. Potato tempura were slightly bland, a bit like very fancy chips, and needed a blast of chilli pepper.
We were by now well into a second carafe of the sake, my friend getting bravely over his doubts about what was for him a new experience and by now agreeing with me that there is no gentler, more pleasing way to get mildly drunk than on hot rice wine. How far this coloured our judgment of the main courses I'm not sure, but we raved about them all. Duck tataki was a generous serving of ultra-thin slices of nicely undercooked duck enriched by a rice wine and oniony marinade, and served with ponzu. Juicy grilled lamb had been marinated in what the specials board listed as a North Korean miso sauce, which we took to be the nuclear option of oriental seasoning, and came in deep pink slices suffused with a potent, char-grilled tang. Mixed mushrooms with sake soy and mixed green veg with truffle oil and soy were both superb, but the undisputed champion in a field packed with winners was the chilli garlic cod, a twist on Nobu's fabled black cod, and as melty, succulent and generally exquisite a piece of white fish as you'll ever encounter.
After that lot, puddings were out of the question, and - eccentrically for the centre of the capital - last orders were called at 2.30pm anyway. So we settled for a third jug of sake, slurrily concluding that with food and service of this quality the name couldn't matter less after all, and that we'd gleefully return to this fabulous little charmer even if its title were changed to the catchy Plague Of Mutant Rats Marauding Through Our Kitchens.
Rating 8.5/10
Telephone 020-7723 0666.
Address 22 Harcourt Street, London W1. Open Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon - 2.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6-10.30pm
