Shoryu Ramen

I've lost count of the number of places I've walked into recently - shops being by far the worst offenders, but a fair number of restaurants and offices too - where no-one's said "Hello!" or otherwise acknowledged my presence. So the cheery, traditional, "Irasshaimase!"  from the staff and beating of a drum on entering Shoryu, London's latest ramen joint on Lower Regent Street, endeared me to the place before even a mouthful of food passed my lips.

But oh, the food...it's wonderful. Just brilliant. So much so, in fact, that after an impressive first visit I returned twice in the space of a week. The room's nothing special - tightly-packed, functional (trans: hard) seating; bright lights, an apparently Spirographed mural - and the Lower Regent Street location, horrible, but these are minor considerations next to the combined allure of the warmth of welcome and the sheer quality of the ramen.

Shoryu's menu, presented on a clipboard, is much longer than at any of the other ramen-ya that have sprung up around town. The basic Shoryu Ganso tonkotsu is a huge bowlful of rich opaque pork-bone broth to which hosomen noodles, tender barbecue pork, crunchy, woody kikurage fungus, seasoned boiled egg (nitamago), beansprouts, spring onions, pickled ginger (gari) and crisp dried seaweed (nori) are added. Then ingredients are added or subtracted to make different dishes, there are miso and soy broth variants, and all can be tweaked and customised to personal taste. There's a good twenty-odd starters and sides to choose from too. 

The dish that blew me (and the cobwebs) away on my first visit was Wasabi Tonkotsu, which saw a sinus-purging whack of potent fresh and pickled wasabi added to a gari-free Shoryu Ganso. It was in many ways the perfect meal; lovely to look at, nourishing, complex - each mouthful slightly different in taste and texture from the last - and filling without leaving one bloated. I loved it; food is often fun, sometimes intriguing, but rarely is it genuinely exciting. This was.

A side-order of chicken kara age, chunks of thigh meat lightly-battered and fried, was initially a little bland but came alive with a squeeze of lemon juice and dipping in the accompanying spiced mayonnaise. Although great value for the portion size at £5, there was rather too much of it for one person; solo diners shouldn't have to miss out on trying extras for fear of over-ordering (not, I'll admit, something that often afflicts me, as my waist size will attest).

I enjoyed the kara age again on my second visit, this time in tori kara age men, one of the shiitake and konbu soy broth choices. Although in its non-broth components not dissimilar to the tonkotsu, this was a much lighter, more cleansing affair, slices of gari folded into the noodles adding little depth-charges of flavour. In this setting the fried chicken - as much of it as in the side-order serving - felt rather decadent. I wasn't sure if I liked the roundels of garish pink fishcake, which didn't feel like they quite belonged in this assembly, but I polished the whole lot off just the same.

On a third occasion I took along my BFF Anders and, as confident as I could be that I wouldn't be chatting anyone up later, ordered the Dracula Tonkotsu. Really it should be called anti-Dracula Tonkotsu as it includes mayu - black garlic oil - and garlic chips, caramelised and roasted to take away some of the pungency but none of the warmth of the vampire repellent. Although enjoyable, of the three ramen I'd now tried it was my least favourite, being rather one-note; that much garlic can't not dominate a dish. Still, I'd order it again, if Buffy was having a night off and there was no snogging to be done.

Anders's Yuzu Tonkotsu was interesting, the fragrant citrus fruit made into a chutney with chilli and piled high in the centre of the bowl. Its citric acidity, which should in theory have cut through the fattiness of the sliced pork and collagen-rich broth, somehow seemed to sit apart from it, but this sort of experimentation is what makes the food at Shoryu so enticing. A side of pork gyoza were, if not the best of their kind, perfectly fine, but as with the kara age on my previous visit not strictly necessary.

Staff, many of them Japanese, provide service that is briskly efficient while also friendly and very courteous; diners are not hurried or harassed but tables are turned at such a rate as to ensure that the queues which inevitably build up at busy times keep moving along. As well as the lively greeting there are other customer-friendly touches; a complimentary palate-awakener of cabbage dressed in rice wine vinegar is brought with the menu, and the discretionary service charge is a modest 10%.

When somewhere like Shoryu opens that nails its concept so assuredly from the get-go, it's always tempting to believe that the first branch might be the prototype for a chain. If that is the case here, then good; I'd welcome a Shoryu on every corner as warmly as they welcome every customer.

Shoryu Ramen, 9 Lower Regent Street, London SW1Y 4LR www.shoryuramen.com







Posted by +Hugh Wright

Sumosan, Mayfair

Coming on for two-and-half-years ago, in one of my very first blog posts, I stated with the sniffy hubris of a know-it-all newcomer that the subject, Automat, occupied 'the site of Oliver Peyton's late, unlamented Coast'. I thought it sounded terribly clever to be so in-the-know, and it's an affectation that's stayed with me down the years - most of my posts make some reference to where a restaurant is (over and above its London district) and what if anything it used to be.

Thank goodness then that the three or so readers I had back in 2009 either didn't notice or knew even less than I thought I did about restaurant premises, because blow me down if I didn't realise, upon arriving for a dinner date at Sumosan, that it in fact occupies 'the site of Oliver Peyton's late, unlamented Coast' and that Automat was, and always had been, on the next street along. Whoops.

Sumosan opened on said vacated site in 2002, a London outpost of a small chain with established branches in Moscow and Kiev. Despite never attracting nearby Nobu's level of fame (or notoriety - to the best of my knowledge no love-children have been conceived on the stairs) Sumosan has obviously been doing something right, as on the evidence of my visit business would appear to be booming. It will come as no surprise, given the Russian backing and super-prime Mayfair location, that Sumosan is aimed squarely at the kind of customer for whom recession only affects the hairline, and on a freezing winter night the huge main dining room and smaller downstairs bar were packed.

To anyone acquainted with London's (or indeed Moscow's) higher-end Japanese restaurants, the menu at Sumosan will be familiar fare; superior sushi and sashimi are offered alongside a lengthy selection of mostly fish dishes, all using only the finest produce at prices to match. I was fortunate to be dining as a guest of the restaurant so was able to order just about everything that appealed; had I not been, prices starting at a fiver for a simple bowl of miso soup would have had me fluttering my eyelashes at the nearest thick-necked, expensively-suited Russkie in the hope of his picking up the bill.

Our tastebuds awakened by a glass of bubbly, aforementioned miso and some salty, warm edamame, we started with some perfect rock shrimp tempura, served with a creamy, spicy dipping sauce, and heady, delicate yellowtail sashimi with truffle.

Lobster salad was as beautiful to eat as to look at; chunks of claw meat in a sweet citrusy dressing came encased in frilly green leaves, the whole assemblage forming a pretty green sphere like a 1950s swimming cap.

Kaiso (seaweed) salad with peanut was fabulous, a rich, nutty palate cleanser to prepare us for silken scallop and sublime toro sashimi. Tuna and truffle California rolls were a decadent take on perhaps the most ubiquitous of sushi dishes. The night's revelation came in the form of red sea urchin roe served in the shell, the top sliced off like an aquatic boiled egg. Quite unlike anything I can remember tasting - smooth, creamy, slightly nutty but with a definite whack of the sea, for once I could see why this particular delicacy is so highly prized.

We finished with a trio of hot dishes which delivered two hits and the night's only miss. Black cod in miso - street food in Japan but the pricy signature of any western restaurant with an eye to the Rising Sun - was amazingly good: sticky and rich, texturally firm enough to pick up with chopsticks but then collapsing almost to syrup in the mouth. Sweet shrimp, served in cute little nuggets just begging to be picked up by fingers and popped in the mouth, was like delicious savoury popcorn. The one slightly duff dish was vegetable tempura; it was fine, with good crunch to both batter and veg, but bland in comparison to everything else and not even enlivened by the accompanying dipping sauce.

I'd love to be able to tell you what we drank, but all I remember is that there were two bottles of it (which possibly explains my amnesia), it was a buttery white - a Meursault? - chosen for us by the chatty, approachable sommelier and very nice indeed.

I'd also love to be able to tell you what this all cost, but in a move perhaps intended to not put people off coming, or simply in recognition of the fact that Sumosan's core customer isn't all that worried about money, there are no prices on the rather clunky corporate website. My guess would be about £100-a-head; four dishes less than we greedily had and just the one bottle of wine would halve that, and you'd still be in for a treat.

The decor's rather dated - I'm not sure it's had more than an occasional lick of paint since 2002 - but everything else about Sumosan is excellent and I highly recommend a visit. When it opened - on, let's not forget, the site of Oliver Peyton's late, unlamented Coast - one critic wondered if Sumosan would last 'a couple of years'. Well pass the chopsticks someone, because nearly ten years later, she needs to eat her words.

Sumosan, 26B Albemarle Street, London W1S 4HY Tel: 020 7495 5999 http://www.sumosan.com 

 

Tokyo Diner, Chinatown

When I decided to start writing this blog and had to come up with a title, I wanted to choose something that was original but not too esoteric and self-explanatory without being trite. Although over time I've found myself wishing that I could have come up with something as brilliant as Thring For Your Supper (now alas soberly renamed 'Oliver Thring') or, my absolute favourite, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Our Bread, I was and remain very satisfied with TwelvePointFivePercent. 


Occasionally when I tell people the name, it takes a few seconds for the penny to drop before they chuckle and say, "Oooh, twelve point five percent service!" but just about everyone gets that I took the title from the pretty-much-ubiquitous 'discretionary' service charge which, with the noble exception of the D&D group, just about everywhere whacks onto your bill these days.

Just about everywhere, that is, except for Tokyo Diner, a groovy little Japanese cafe just off Leicester Square, which not only doesn't add service to your bill, or stamp on your bill in red that service is not included, but actively states on it's menu that it won't take tips. Yes, you read that right, won't take tips.

According to the menu, 'Paying extra for service is a foreign concept. Since Tokyo Diner first opened in 1992, tips have never been expected or accepted. Any money which is mistakenly left on tables goes to St. Martin-in-the-Fields’ unit for the Homeless.' How brilliant is that? 'Mistakenly left on tables' has to be one of the subtlest pieces of cultural snobbery I've ever encountered, as if to say 'Ha! You English people and your crazy insistence on tipping! You get fleeced for twelve point five percent in most places and in the ones that don't, you feel obliged to leave it anyway! FOOLS!' Next time you're in a Japanese restaurant and service is added or the bill's left open, you might want to bear this in mind when deciding what, if anything, to leave.

The no tipping policy isn't the only endearing thing about Tokyo Diner (to which I was taken by my pal Greg when we were in need of sustenance and a stiff drink after seeing Debbie Reynolds' slightly surreal one-woman show on Thursday night). It's light, bright and spotlessly clean, with functional wooden bench seating configured in sociable twos, fours and sixes and set with everything one could possibly need including pots of disposable chopsticks, bottles of good soy and ton katsu sauces and a sprinkler of shichimi seasoning. As soon as you're seated, you're brought complimentary green tea and a little dish of rice crackers to graze on while choosing your food. Staff - almost all Japanese, for reasons explained on the quirky website - are enthusiastic, polite and humorous, evidently taking both pleasure and pride in what they're doing.

The menu offers a familiar selection of curries, noodle soups, bento boxes and sushi, all at super-reasonable prices. Should you be feeling particularly hungry (and we were - sitting through two hours of Carrie Fisher anecdotes works up one hell of an appetite), extra rice is offered with any dish completely free of charge - but 'please don't waste it' the menu exhorts. Another example of the restaurant's iron-clad social conscience is that there's no tuna on the menu, and there won't be until Tokyo Diner finds 'a trustworthy sustainable source'. Fortunately neither of us had our heart set on tuna that night and both went for a bento box, Greg's vegetarian, mine ton katsu.

Each was very good, and abundant, Greg's vegetarian option substituting a generous helping of stir-fried mixed vegetables for the crispy-coated pork fillet in mine. Other components were interesting and delicious; as well as a mound of rice we enjoyed pickles, a refreshing, sharp wakame salad, braised aubergine, some butter-soft salmon sashimi in mine and veggie California rolls in Greg's. The resulting whole was, as a good bento box should be, a substantial, balanced meal of complementary flavours and textures, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. Our enjoyment was further enhanced by a bottle of the house white wine, a very drinkable Vin de Pays du Comte Tolosan, strong in Sauvignon Blanc flavour and an incredible bargain at just £6.90. The mark-up on that can't be more than about a token 25% which just makes me like the people behind Tokyo Diner even more.

The bill, for food, that great value wine and absolutely not one single percent service, came to just sixteen quid each and could have been even less if we'd not been so badly in need of liquor. Tokyo Diner shoots right to the top of my list of favourite casual/cheap-eats options; instead of leaving a tip they ask that you 'Please come back and bring your friends' and it's a certainty that I will. I just hope that the no tipping policy doesn't catch on too widely, else I may find myself once again racking my meagre brains for a new blog title.

Tokyo Diner, 2 Newport Place, London WC2H 7JJ Tel:020 7287 8777 http://www.tokyodiner.com 

 

Ikkyusan

Gerrard Street, the colourful, noisy thoroughfare which runs the entire length of London's Chinatown, is known and feared in equal measure for its intense concentration of Chinese restaurants, ranging from the deeply authentic to the shamelessly touristy and the cheap 'n' cheerful to painfully pricey. Every Londoner has their favourite (mine's Imperial China, FYI), recommended to friends and tourists with a knowing wink and a tap of the nose to underline how privileged this information is, a falsehood exposed the minute they arrive to find that every table is occupied by diners sent there by someone similarly in the know. Some of the places on the strip have been in business for decades, and alluring tales - probably apocryphal - of outrageously rude service, and secret menus featuring 'proper' Chinese food, only given out on request, ensure that the restaurant industry in this part of town will ride out every economic twist and downturn. What might come as a surprise is that in addition to the dizzying array of Chinese eateries, there's also a smattering of food joints of other origins, and it was to one of these - Japanese, Thai and dim sum specialist Ikkyusan - that my banker pal Patsy took me for dinner last night.

It's a very nice space, a cut above what one might expect in this area; the long ground-floor room is decked out izakaya style with lots of foliage and subtle lighting complementing dark tiling and walls, while upstairs there's an authentic ryokan-style dining room with tatami matting and low-level tables for cross-legged eating. Pats and I being rather larger of frame than your typical Japanese gentlemen went for the western option, and ate downstairs at a traditional table more suited to our heights.

The menu - which in common with even some fairly high-end Oriental places features pictures of the food, rather to my chagrin - is diverse but not to the point of being overwhelming. There's a good choice of sushi and sashimi (prepared before your very eyes at an open sashimi bar at the front of the restaurant), dim sum all day, noodle soups every which way you could possibly wish for and a long list of bento box options. It's from this latter that Patsy and I both chose the delicious sounding Surf 'n' Turf bento, promising tempura prawns and teriyaki beef in addition to the usual white rice, miso soup, salad and pickles for a very reasonable £12.50.

We certainly weren't disappointed; our boxes were huge and made up of excellent component parts. The steak used in the teriyaki was perfectly tender, and the tempura included a generous serving of giant prawns in a light, crackling batter just as it should be. There were some pieces of vegetable tempura added to the mix - a very welcome extra - and the rice and miso were both of good quality. My only minor gripe was that the salad was a bit boring, just lettuce, carrot and sweetcorn rather than the more usual combination of mixed leaves and radish say, but the rest of the box made up for this slight flaw by being so good.

We washed everything down with a bottle of house white - I didn't note the name but recall that it was Italian, dry, not in the least unpleasant and about twelve quid - but could have chosen from a better selection of beers, juices, soft drinks and sakes than I've seen in many other pan-Oriental joints. Our bill for bento boxes, a bottle of wine plus an extra glass for Pats and 12.5% service came to just over £20 a head, which felt about right.

With further research it transpires that Ikkyusan is part of the ever-expanding and well-respected Hi Sushi group of restaurants, which rather explains the better-than-average quality (that said, I was massively underwhelmed at the launch of their recent Covent Garden outpost Hi Sushi Izakaya, so they don't get everything right). Purely because I tend only to go through Chinatown on my way to or from Soho, rather than as a destination in itself, I don't think I'll necessarily be back at Ikkyusan any time soon, but that's certainly not to say that I wouldn't recommend it. In fact, next time you're asked by someone for your insider-knowledge recommendation of where to eat in Chinatown, I'd encourage you to surprise them with your contrariness and send them here.

Ikkyusan, 39 Gerrard Street, London W1D 5QD Tel: 020 7434 0899 http://www.ikkyusan.co.uk/

Feng Sushi

Well my new found love of Ping Pong (see ‘Chains Round-Up’) looks set to be short-lived: wanting a quick bit of sustenance before sitting through two hours of Phèdre at the National Theatre, Simon B and I popped into the South Bank branch only to be told that despite all visual evidence to the contrary (i.e: empty seats aplenty) there would be a wait of half an hour for a table. Not by us there wouldn’t be; neither of us had any intention of risking indigestion with Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper waiting for us, so off we buggered to Feng Sushi a few doors down and - dreadful name notwithstanding – it wasn’t a bad performance.

It has to be said that for a casual diner – generic modern-Oriental elements including white walls, bare wooden tables and disposable chopsticks all present and correct – the menu struck me as being not only fairly expensive, but also haphazardly priced. The wide but incohesive range of starters, bento boxes and sushi and sashimi in both selections and individual servings roller-coastered from four or five quid to around £20, eschewing the familiar pricing structure of comparable places such as Satsuma and Wagamama where the distance from cheapest to dearest dish is no further than about a fiver.

Stability was better however in the main courses section, where from a short selection all around the £12 mark Simon and I both chose ‘Japanese Fish and Chips’ for £11, three fat goujons of cod tempura served with hand-cut potato and sweet potato chips. It was a hefty portion - never a bad thing in my book – and completely delicious. The full-flavoured cod retained all its firmness under the light crunchy batter and was accompanied perfectly by a generous mound of tasty, chunky chips, sweet chilli dip and Feng Sushi’s own special, herby mayonnaise. It was a clever, well-executed take on a quintessentially British dish, and something I’d definitely go back for.

And speaking of quintessentially British dishes of which I’d most definitely like a large portion, Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus was amazing – brooding, angst-y, strong and – in a little black singlet and army trousers - tastier even than cod tempura.

Feng Sushi, Unit 9, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 8XX and branches tel: 020 7261 0001 http://www.fengsushi.co.uk/