Akira at Japan House review: This temple to Japanese minimalism needs a less fussy approach to food

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David Sexton27 June 2018

Walk in here and all the cooks in the open kitchen loudly cheer you: “Irrashaimase!”

It means “come in, welcome”, and it’s traditional in many establishments in Japan, not just restaurants. Disconcerting if you’re not expecting it — it rarely happens when you go into a Wetherspoons, does it?

Japan House is a grand new establishment within the listed former Derry and Toms building, designed in the 1920s by the Barkers architect Bernard George. This is the third Japan House launched by the country’s government in the past year, the others in São Paulo and Los Angeles, all hubs aiming to provide “a forum for creative and intellectual exchange between Japan and the rest of the world”.

This one’s a minimalist spectacular, all glass and white walls, with a floor boasting 14,500 handmade “Kawara” tiles, all subtly different. The designer is Katayama Masamichi, who created Uniqlo’s flagship store in Oxford Street, while the creative director is Hara Kenya, Muji’s long-term art director.

On the ground floor there’s a coffee bar and a gallery-style display of design and craft items for sale. Downstairs there’s an impressive “hall” or lecture theatre, a compact library of books about Japan, and an exhibition space, currently displaying inventive, fanciful maquettes by the architect Sou Fujimoto, the designer of the 2013 Serpentine Pavilion.

And upstairs — reached now by a prettily lit spiral staircase, made in Japan, or a glass lift, not yet working when we visited for lunch on Monday — is Japan House’s restaurant, Akira, claiming to offer “a Japanese restaurant like no other seen before in London”.

This floor has a warmer aesthetic, with a black slatted ceiling, a black metal lattice screen and handcrafted wooden furniture. There’s a bar, looking out over Kensington High Street and, behind it, a windowless tatami room, for private dining in traditional style, sitting around a low table. The restaurant has well-spaced tables and handsome stick-back chairs: you can sit on stumpy versions of them at the bar around the kitchen to watch the chefs at work.

Akira is named after its executive chef, Shimizu Akira. I was wowed by his food when I reviewed his first London opening, Engawa, a 29-cover place in in Soho, in 2015, visiting for a nine-course evening menu, and then for a £40, 14-piece bento box at lunchtime.​

Treasure box: 15 compartments of assorted sashimi
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

Engawa’s big selling point was its rare and precious Kobe beef but the sushi and sashimi were equally knockout. The restaurant’s size gave it a feel of a counter-style operation, with chefs working in front of the guests. Akira is grander, more remote “kaiseki” style: fine dining, emphasising presentation and multiple courses.

In the evening there’s a long à la carte menu, including many items from the robata charcoal grill, but for lunch at the moment there’s just a list of set meals. We went for one Lunch Robata Omakase (chef’s choice) and one Lunch Sushi Omakase, both £60, and were disappointed to find that, except for one main dish, they were identical. More explanation could be offered on the menu, if the aim is to grasp Japanese culture.

As an appetiser, two salmon and tuna crepe rolls, flavoured with uni (sea urchin gonads) and doused in a creamy sauce covered with truffle shavings, were presented, resting at the bottom of a huge, irregularly shaped ceramic vessel decorated with gold patches. They were soft, rich and a bit overwhelming: not so much an appetite-awakener as fair warning that this restaurant is going for high-impact lavishness.

A sashimi selection followed, in tiny dishes within a 15-compartment wooden box. The central row of fish included two slices each of lean and fatty tuna, salmon, sea bass and yellowtail, all bedecked with seasonings. Other offerings appealed less: sour pickled lotus and carrot, for example, two slices of cold omelette, and a dollop of gloopy potato salad with bacon and sweetcorn, one of the wacky legacies of American occupation. Some amazingly soft and gelatinous pork belly came in an aromatic stock but it had a huge blob of mayo on top nonetheless — a recurrent touch here, with extra chilli mayo repeatedly offered on the side.

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A lightly set, soy-flavoured egg custard, topped with three edamame beans, was silky, or you might say slippery — such slipperiness being a consistency enjoyed in Japan. Altogether this sashimi box, although eminently instagrammable, was less rewarding than simpler versions in smaller restaurants. Such food can’t fluently be served to many diners at once, however many chefs pack the room.

The robata main was another dramatic presentation: a small fillet of wagyu beef, dressed with chopped chives, sizzling on top of a hot rock, scorching the wooden board it sat on, accompanied by more sauces (soy, sesame, mayo and chilli) and some overcooked, deep-fried and slightly curried okra.

The beef had great depth of flavour combined with improbable unctuosity, making it a big taste-and-texture hit rather than humdrum food. The sushi version of the main course was even harder to take: fatty rare beef on peculiarly sweet rice, with salmon eggs, crumbled roe and pieces of chives.

A side-box of sushi included pieces of unappealing scallop, octopus and flabby salmon eggs. One of us got a miso soup to help it along, the other didn’t, service being a little haphazard.

We shared an Akira pudding (£8) — another creamy custard, containing tofu topped with green tea-flavoured chunks and liquid brown sugar — a Japanese riff on crème brûlée. We finished feeling clobbered by fattiness, sweetness and saltiness, and the needless multiplication of entities, far from what we usually enjoy in Japanese restaurants, and that we had spent a potty amount of money for lunch.

Tofu pudding: Japanese take on crème brûlée
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

Perhaps the balance of the food, as well as the feel of the room, will be different in the evenings? And the nightclubby music more appropriate? At the moment, this fussy, over-rich cooking seems strangely at odds with the clean minimalism projected by the rest of Japan House.

David's Week In Food

1. On Thursday evening, a lovely, simple summery meal — cured salmon, chicken, strawberries — at the Penguin Press dinner at Asia House, catered by Arnold & Henderson of Rochelle Canteen.

2. I’d intended to serve a nice little Maistres Occitans bloc de foie gras de canard au piment d’Espelette, brought back from France, with drinks in the garden on Friday evening — but suddenly revolted against grease in the heat. Speck and figs instead.

3. My only regret about no longer living in Islington is being further away from the great fishmonger, Steve Hatt. An early morning sortie on Saturday transformed the weekend. Clams with linguine for lunch.

4. On Sunday, I enjoyed slicing a terrific piece of Hatt’s tuna into sashimi: quite incorrectly done maybe, but so tasty with a little wasabi and Kikkoman soy sauce.

5. Punitive office lunch: teriyaki chicken wings, rice and broccoli from the Whole Foods Kensington hot bar. Almost a tenner! This may be the end.

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