17-20 Kendal Street, London W2 (020 3475 4158). Meal for two, with drinks and service, £140
It’s unavoidable. Even those of us who regard ourselves as glossy sophisticates, as people with a laser-guided precision understanding of the diversity of the world’s kitchens, do it. We have a tiny, confined image of each major cooking tradition. Spain is where you go for sliced bits of pig, with fat the colour of antique white piano keys. Italy is for big bowls of pasta. France is for anything involving butter. Ukraine has dishes called things like Grandmother’s Golubzi, which sound like an infection requiring ointment. Middle America is where you go for type 2 diabetes.
And Japan? That’s where you go for minimalism, precision and subtlety. Of course, these are all caricatures. Spain has some dishes which don’t include any bits of pig at all. Not many, but some. Occasionally Italians eat things which aren’t pasta. The French have been known to cook with olive oil rather than butter, though they tend to be annoyingly smug about it. Ukraine has some dishes which don’t sound like a diagnosis. And not everybody in Middle America is insulin-dependent. Yet.
Still, as with all clichés and caricatures, they are firmly grounded in truth. Japanese food arrived in Britain properly in the 1980s as sushi, as miracles of concentration and smallness and subtlety, and stayed that way for a very long time. Then along comes a place like Kurobuta – it’s the Japanese word for the Berkshire breed of pig – and all those preconceived ideas start to fall apart. To be fair, my notions of Japanese food have been crumbling for a while now, through my friendship with Wisconsin-born, London-based, Japanese food-loving Tim Anderson, who won MasterChef in 2011. He’s a panellist on Radio 4’s Kitchen Cabinet, which is essentially a food version of Gardeners’ Question Time, only with innuendo and knob gags. (The show is a work of genius; this assessment is purely objective and nothing to do with the fact I present it).
Anderson is steeped deep in the culture of the izakaya, the Japanese drinking den where food is also served, from which Kurobuta also takes its inspiration. In izakayas the menu is always a long way from genteel plates of raw fish. It is huge flavours and grilling and stickiness and miso; lots of miso, the umami-flavoured paste made from fermented soya beans, salt, fungi and a few other things besides which comes in forms many and various from light and soft to dark and heavy and fruity (and which makes you want to drink more). If Anderson is asked how to get flavour into an ingredient on The Kitchen Cabinet, then his answer usually involves smearing it with miso.
That is generally the answer at Kurobuta, a hard-surfaced café space in London’s Bayswater full of manmade materials, dangling bare bulbs, lightly throbbing music and Antipodean briskness. It belongs to Australian Scott Hallsworth, who started at Nobu in London, where he rose to be head chef before heading back to his native Australia to work up his repertoire of big, sticky miso and chilli flavours. He returned to London to open a pop-up on the King’s Road (which is still there) and now has this permanent space. Here, he works the pass from the dining room side of the bar dressed, on a hot day, in cargoes and a T-shirt, a blue and white apron marking him out as chef rather than bartender. He flashes the blowtorch. He sprinkles. He smears.
I want to rave about the food, because that combination of sugar and salt and umami and smoke – punched through with Korean high notes of kimchi (chilli-fermented cabbage) and their famous garlicky chilli sauce the colour of fresh arterial blood – is insanely delicious. It’s compelling. It’s addictive. It’s a face-down, smear-my-cheeks-and-call-me-Doris, smack-about-the-chops experience. But it’s also ridiculously expensive. I knew things were out of whack when I found myself thinking £14 for a sizable portion of pork ribs was good value. It isn’t. There is also some silliness, including a menu section called “Japanese junk food”. At these prices you don’t get to use language like that.
Still, if you can stomach the cost and the posing, this can be cooking with a capital C. We start with freshly podded broad beans in a crisp tempura batter, with the nose-tickling hit of wasabi salt. Next come two fat scallops, each sliced in half horizontally, their surfaces blowtorched, but the rest entirely raw with that familiar sweet, sticky softness. They lie in a startlingly orange puddle of butter flavoured with kimchi, with strands of crunchy cabbage fizzing with chilli and salt draped over them. The whole dish is brazen, like a peacock’s mating display realised in food.
There are the crispest pieces of tempura-ed black pepper soft-shell crab, each crunch through the greaseless batter releasing another puff of musky fish and spice. We swoon over two perfectly cooked tea-smoked lamb chops from the robata grill, smeared with miso and dribbled with chilli sauce, and try not to think about the £15.50 price tag. Those pork ribs, pre-braised, then grilled and given the umami/salt/sugar treatment, are simply addictive; I imagine myself checking into The Priory, my face sticky with the sauce, strands of meat still hanging from my teeth. A star of the show is their take on nasu dengaku: cubes of aubergine, roasted until barely holding structural integrity, dressed with more sweet miso and sprinkled with the crunch of candied walnuts. It’s one of those non-meat dishes which takes ignorant meat–eaters by surprise.
There is utter silliness in the £19 charged for two tiny sliders made with wagyu, that hugely expensive Japanese beef, prized for its texture and marbling. It’s pointless using the named ingredient when, firstly, its texture is lost to the mincing machine, and secondly the subtle flavour is overwhelmed by the onion rings, pickled cucumber and umami mayo. They are fabulous if your sugar daddy is paying, but cheaper beef could have used to similar effect. It is revealing that the low point of the meal is two pieces of salmon nigiri sushi. The rice is simply poor: claggy, dense and undervinegared. An attempt at béarnaise sauce doesn’t help. Hallsworth doesn’t do subtle.
Still, after that low comes an impeccable take on lemon tart using the fragrant Japanese citrus yuzu. It is a beautiful thing. Unlike the bill, which is absurd, and we didn’t even rampage through the sake list. But you get the idea by now. A meal at Kurobuta may hurt. It may make you question your priorities. But it will certainly wake you up.
Jay’s news bites
■ For more familiar Japanese food try The Shiori, not far away from Kurobuta on Moscow Road. When it first opened near Euston station it was applauded for its kaiseki- style menu of miniature sashimi wonders. Now on larger premises in Bayswater it goes from strength to strength. Go for rice with simmered eel and sansho, red bean miso soup with ao-nori, and some of the most lovingly prepared raw fish you’ll find anywhere in London (theshiori.com).
■ A big Mexican wave from Jay’s News Bites for Emma O’Connor, manager of the Cheltenham branch of Brasserie Blanc, who posted this sign on a blackboard outside: “Breastfeeding mums: pop in and have a free cup of tea if you need a pit stop... no need to eat, no need to ask – please relax.” Unsurprisingly, an image of the sign went viral.
■ I like a book title which tells you all you need to know, so top marks to Delicious Vermin by Rosie Barham, which is full of recipes for the sorts of animals farmers would like to be shot of. Or just shoot, including rabbit and squirrel. It’s available from calmproductions.com, priced £14.99.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
