Sosharu, 64 Turnmill Street, London EC1 (020 3805 2304). Meal for two including drinks and service: £100 - £140
With Jason Atherton’s new restaurant Sosharu I could easily have got hung up on definitions. For a start it describes itself as an izakaya. In Japan an izakaya is a kind of gastro pub; an after-work kick-back of a place for the loosening of ties and the drowning of sorrows. Sosharu is far too poised and self-conscious and expensive – let’s get the “E” word out of the way early – to be one of those. It is an izakaya in the way the Savoy is somewhere to sleep for the night, or Agent Provocateur is a place to buy your pants.
Even describing it as a Japanese restaurant doesn’t quite do it. Yes, the food here is Japanese, and very nice it is, too. But you would not find somewhere like this, with such a broad menu, bowing at myriad culinary stations of the cross, in Japan. Think of it instead as the sort of all-embracing, utterly self-aware Japanese restaurant you would find in Los Angeles, transported here to London’s Clerkenwell. Just as with such places in LA, it is dressed in sandy desert shades; doubtless, on a Farrow & Ball colour chart, they would have names like Savage Ground, Oxford Stone and Clunch. It makes sandpaper-textured brown look sexy.
The last time I was on this site it was a nightclub called Turnmills and I was being thrown out. The club was one of the first in London to have been given a continuous licence and my editor thought it would be fun if I pulled the full 24 hours. There was a photographer with me for whom, stupidly, we had not got clearance. Turnmills being a mostly gay club and this being two decades ago, the clientele did not take kindly. We were ejected after just an hour, which was a relief. I didn’t want to go clubbing for a full day.
Twenty years on and I’m delighted to return. As long as you save up, you can eat very well at Sosharu. In the past I’ve tried hard to like Jason Atherton’s restaurants and not quite managed it. His places have the word “social” in their title, without really being so. The name brags of informality and yet the corporate top button has stayed fastened. They’ve always felt over-engineered and tense, like an ill-advised wedding where something is about to go gloriously wrong. Perhaps the Japanese aesthetic, here executed by head chef Alex Craciun, suits him better. Precision verging on nerdiness, which elsewhere can be exhausting, becomes a virtue.
We ignore the sashimi; there are so many other places in London for that. Instead we start, from the section mark chilled, with a tartare of scallops, each micro-cut cube lightly sticky and sweet, with texture supplied by puffed toasted rice. There are fresh peas, all sweetness and sunlight, and the aromatics of sesame and a lemon purée so vibrant you can almost hear it thrumming on the plate. You eat it with a spoon. This happens quickly, however restrained you attempt to be.
An open temaki sushi – an envelope of toasted, then tempuraed nori – comes filled with cubes of tuna tartare bound with spiced mayonnaise and a blitz of spring onions (here called scallions; just keep muttering Los Angeles under your breath). It is crisp and soft, subtle and powerful. And all in roughly one mouthful each, which is a neat trick if you can manage it.
Many of these dishes display huge amounts of work. Who bothers to tunnel bone a chicken wing? And how do you find a bird this big? The wings have been stuffed with forcemeat then glazed and grilled and are begging to be chewed right back to the wing tip. A classic whine from commenters below these reviews online is that they could stay home and make this food for a fraction of the cost. Apart from wishing that those people would indeed stay home, putting the rest of us out of their misery, I am struck that they really couldn’t make this food at home. Or if they could do so, they should immediately open their own restaurant.
On it goes. A long-roasted steak of aubergine, miso-glazed with sweet-salty caramel flavours, is a mixture of chewy and pleasing languid squelch. It is piled beneath a well-dressed herb salad and the crunch of deep-fried shallots. Most beguiling of all is a round of long-braised pork belly, in a liquor described as “ramen sauce”. It recalls the lip-smacking stickiness of a tonkotsu stock, made of pig parts simmered for the length of a licence at Turnmills nightclub, but isn’t quite the real thing. Perhaps they don’t want to be called out for being inauthentic, hence the “ramen sauce” title. All that aside it is deep and powerful and soothing. Swimming in those depths are thick, slippery udon noodles but also, wittily, ribbons of king oyster mushroom shaped to mimic them.
Two dishes raise not so much doubts as a twitch of the eyebrow. A grilled ribeye, perfectly cubed and then reassembled for ease of eating, comes with both a smear of rust-coloured miso and a bowl of a sweet soy glaze. You dip the meat in one or other and then dredge it through crisps of deep-fried garlic and ginger so the pieces stick. It’s a compelling process. I’m just not quite sure why the beef is American (USDA), which I’ve always found to be teething-toddler soft. The menu says they are inspired by the British seasons so why drag the meat all that way? We’re good at beef in the UK. And if it came from closer to home perhaps the £25 price tag could come down a little. The Japanese fried chicken, at £6.50 a relative bargain, isn’t quite the fantasia of crispness of that offered by Nanban in Brixton or at the Tonkotsu ramen shops. But I am being exceptionally picky.
We finish with a syrup-drenched sponge beneath an aerated pillow of cream, hiding a soft chocolate ganache along with a sweet soy caramel sauce and a green tea-flavoured crêpe cake. (It’s a cake. Made of piled-up pancakes. If you haven’t had one you should. They are so much the thing, darling.) There are extensive sake lists, and supermodel bottles of wine, but a reasonable choice by the glass. Plus, downstairs, there’s a cocktail bar full of sleek lines and brushed wood and the promise of lost nights. As ever at these places the bill piles up, like the snows of a Boston winter. But for once, at an Atherton joint, that expense feels justified.
News bites
■ Like Sosharu, Nanban in Brixton is a Japanese restaurant run by a chef from elsewhere. Wisconsin-born Tim Anderson (full disclosure: he appears with me on BBC Radio 4’s Kitchen Cabinet), developed his fascination while as a student in Japan and went on to win British MasterChef. At Nanban he brings his nerdy fascination to a repertoire of Japanese soul food – not a bit of sushi in sight – focusing on gutsy bowls of ramen (nanban.co.uk).
■ Good news for those who can’t abide the uncertainty of non-reservation restaurants. Blacklock in Soho, which specialises in chops flamed over fire, is now taking bookings up until 6pm. It’s a start (theblacklock.com).
■ Call off the search. Sticky Walnut chef Gary Usher, who issued a call for help locating a site for his third restaurant after his first choice in Chorlton fell through, has found what he’s looking for. The part-crowdfunded Hispi Bistro is taking over what was Jem and I in Didsbury. The menu will include ‘some kind of sticky braised meat’. Sounds fine by me.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
