Sake No Hana, 23 St James's Street, London SW1 (020 7925 8988)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £150
At some point in this review I will become the type of person I'd enjoy punching. I'll apologise in advance. Sake No Hana is an attempt by Alan Yau, the man behind Hakkasan and Wagamama, to gift London a high-end Japanese restaurant. A little while ago I spent a delirious week eating in the restaurants of Tokyo and I therefore can't pretend I don't have a benchmark by which to compare this place. People who do the 'it's nothing like the real thing' speech generally make me want to reach for the cattle prod, but I know I can't help myself.
Sake No Hana occupies a site that was once Shumi, a restaurant of such awe-inspiring stupidity it's a wonder those involved were not arrested for crimes against food. The site's renovation is dramatic. The entrance hall is dominated by narrow escalators that lead to the first-floor dining room. Where at Shumi they were white and grubby, here they rise out of a foyer encased in shiny black. It's like riding the long zip up a patent leather boot. Above is a stunning space, the high ceilings filled with a latticework of wooden beams. Most of the seating, which requires the removal of footwear, is at low tables over a well into which your legs disappear. Serious games of footsie will be played in this restaurant.
Unless, of course, the food is too distracting. Our waitress described Sake No Hana as a kaiseki restaurant - referencing a style of multi-course meals - and the menu follows the traditional structure, starting with small plates and working through sashimi to grilled, via deep-fried and braised to sushi. It is, for the most part, unreconstructed Japanese cookery. Rectangles of cool, soft aubergine came with a sweet, nutty paste of sesame and flakes of bonito. Shreds of king crab arrived set in a sweet plum wine jelly, with bright-orange pearls of salmon roe: £3.50 for these seemed reasonable pricing, as did £6 for three slices of belly tuna otoro - one of the better examples I have eaten in this country.
Beware, though. A full assault on the menu can result in a big bill - however, there are other ways. A star of our night, from the braised list, was a sizeable pot of black-leg chicken in a sweet, umami-rich sauce with soya beans and sugar snap peas for £24. That, with a few small plates, would keep two people happy. Sushi was mostly fine. The sea urchin was far better than that. Sea urchin has a ripe, sexy flavour all its own, and if you don't like it, true adulthood still awaits you.
There were down points. A tiddly tranche of yellowtail teriyaki for £15 was a dud - merely dark and salty rather than the sweet, buttery thing it should be. A rice dish with sea bream and dashi was strange. Sake No Hana's one great fault, though, is the toilets, which must be reached by lift. The humdrum business of going for a pee can take an age.
But what struck me most was the length of the menu. The fact is that Sake No Hana is more a take on the kaiseki restaurant than the real thing. (Here's my 'punch me' moment.) In Japan, restaurants like this tend to be tiny and the menu short; the range is narrower, but the cooking more acute. So do not mistake what this place is offering. This is ersatz kaiseki - good, but not a patch on the real thing. (Punch me now.) It does, however, have a charming sake sommelier, a burly Australian chap with a nice selection of sakes in small carafes, who is eager to please.
And that sums up the place. Sake No Hana is a genuine attempt to introduce people to something new. It's not their fault that some of us have come across this sort of thing before. The fact is there's no pleasing some people, and in this case one of those people is me.
