The Times Magazine 109even acknowledged, we have time to mull our
options, which include a dozen very small
tables along the wall, which are tightly packed
and will necessitate being wedged very close
to the people next to us, and two rather
forbidding place settings at the corner of a
large kitchen table at which many men are
chopping and prepping, where the order slips
are lined up next to you and the cooks so
close you’d feel like you ought to roll your
sleeves up and muck in.
The seating lady, when she eventually
comes, offers us these – no, thanks – and then
two spots at an empty bar in the middle of
the room. I cannot sit down at an empty bar
at half past noon. I’d feel like an alcoholic
detective in a 1970s cop drama.
So we are shown further back to a lot of
tables in the brightly lit interior, where it is
very hot and rather smelly, which won’t do at
all. It’s weird that these tables are even here,
and the chefs bathing in the noonday sunlight
out front. For the first 200 years of restaurant
history, the assumption was that the chaps
who did the cooking would slave away in the
bowels of the restaurant while the smart folk
in the fancy clothes did their eating in the
main room. But things have so flipped round,
and cooks achieved such social primacy, that
they get the best table in the house now, and
paying guests are chucked in the cheap seats.
So we shuffle back towards the front door
and accept the small table next to the elegant
Japanese ladies, which isn’t at all bad, really.
I sigh and lean my elbows on it. It wobbles,
because not everywhere can have a single
piece of virgin timber, hand plucked from the
cypress forests of Avalon and planed down
fresh by trained elves before every service, like
at the Rotunda.
They take a bit too long to offer us water
and we watch, parched, as a waiter theatrically
tosses rice and meat in a big black Le Creuset
for the Japanese ladies, his bum resting on our
table because the space between tables is so
narrow there is nowhere else for it to rest. We
can’t really talk, on account of the intruding
bum, so we listen to the loud funk music
coming out of the speaker directly above
our heads. Not by choice, mind. It just keeps
coming out and there is nothing else we can
do with it. But when the waiter is done, he
turns and offers to bring us water, finally, and
we are happy again.
He also brings a short menu broken down
into five starters, four main dishes of expensive
beef and a market price fish steak, as well
as eight varieties of raw fish, to be eaten as
sashimi or nigiri sushi, and six temaki rolls.
From the starters, we order a seaweed salad
and a mushroom miso soup, skip the mains
and order the three types of tuna – lean,
fatty and very fatty – as well as trout (which
you don’t often see), scallop, sea urchin and
yellowtail, and ask for them all as nigiri. Plus
a temaki roll each – one scallop, one fattytuna – and “whatever that meat and rice thing
is those ladies are having”. It is a special,
apparently, called beef gohan.
The soup is very good and clean and the
seaweed salad is fine, nutty with sesame oil
and chopped hazelnuts, and the sushi is good,
top-drawer. Or second-top-drawer. Clean
T-shirts, rather than pants and socks. The
three tuna nigiri offer a fine procession
through the fat levels of better than average
raw fish, the yellowtail is clean and sharp, the
trout lively, the scallop sweet and yielding,
the urchin reassuringly expensive. But as
the waitress lowers the beautiful fish on their
black slate bed to the table, she bangs it loudly
on Esther’s water glass, goes, “Oops! Sorry,”
jinks sideways and plonks it on the table at
the second attempt. It is still good raw fish
after that, on the right kind of fresh, sticky
rice, but it cannot be magical now. Not after
the “Clang! Oops! Plonk!”
The temaki rolls come half-folded in clever
little wooden holders for us to pick up and roll
ourselves, but there is a little too much filling
for the square of seaweed, so they won’t quite
roll over (bad dog!). And the seaweed is a
little chewy, not frangible enough to bite
mouthfuls away from the roll and leave it
intact (can this be the “signature” seaweed
they use at the Rotunda, so beloved of Endo’s
grandfather? I’m guessing not) so that Esther’s
falls to bits over her plate, and she gives up on it.
And then the beef gohan, the cast-iron
dish of rice, with stew on top and a raw
egg, that we had seen the waiter very much
“performing” to the two Japanese ladies. Our
waitress does not perform. She slots us in
between seating duties, one eye on the door.
I know this is not Benihana, but any dish
that the server prepares and serves at the
table is surely intended to have a narrative.
She just stirs it around a couple of times while
telling us the pot is hot and asking us if we’d
ever had it before (“What, beef stew? Food?”)
and then slops out portions into our bowls like
a school dinner lady or a busy mum feeding
her kids at teatime, spilling some on her
towelled hand as she does so, and some on the
table. I couldn’t fault it as a beef, rice and egg
dish, especially the crispy “soccarat” scraped
up and stirred in (by me, because she didn’t
bother), but as a performance? Nul points.
And thus I leave this very good restaurant
rather disappointed. I try to console myself
that nowhere is perfect. But, you see, I’ve been
to Endo at the Rotunda, so I know different. nSumi
157 Westbourne Grove,
London W11 (020 4524
0880; sushisumi.com)
Food 8.23
Layout 6.02
Service 5.94
Score 6.73
Price £167.63 for two
(with no drink at all),
but I don’t mind that
because great fish is
expensive and must
be paid for. This is
not a perfect world.