Shackfuyu: Japanese fast food very worth filling up on

Grace Dent orders one of everything at her new Soho favourite Shackfuyu
Soho secret: Shackfuyu
Grace Dent31 January 2018

A positive boon for any restaurant to possess is a name diners can remember, in order to help with locating it. Shackfuyu, a new Japanese fast food filling stop on Old Compton Street, fails beautifully for me on this count. Some of the 17 other names I called it pre-visit were even accidentally smutty. That said, I’ll be content if everyone else gets hopelessly lost. Right now Shackfuyu is my secret.

Has anyone else even noticed the vanishing of Made in Italy on Old Compton Street, that big, bland tourist magnet, a few doors down from restaurant-to-wish-upon-your-nemesis The Stockpot? I’ll cry no tears for its demise as the Bone Daddies crew has taken over the building, changed Italy to a Far East theme with a quick lick of cream and racing green paint and kept the pizza oven to cook up dishes such as the rather extraordinarily good beef picanha with spicy kimchee and pickled onion. Don’t be fooled by the shopfront, which suggests a tiny venue with a mere few tables. Shackfuyu is cavernous, with booths for six and plenty of space to spread one’s wings.

I am, via past experience, fiercely pro the Bone Daddies family. Always open, food always decent, chipper staff, free-flowing booze. Flesh & Buns in Covent Garden is a little slice of solace in a tough London day. I’m in there for hirata buns and salmon teriyaki more often than I want to admit. Now, at Shackfuyu, they’re serving a long list of beautifully glutinous snacky Bone Daddies-style small plates: quick-fire, diet-destroying dishes with whimsical names such as ‘prawn toast masquerading as okonomiyaki’.

Only an evil genius would combine these foodstuffs so close to bikini season. Moist, guzzle-friendly portions of fried prawn toast crisscrossed in mayo, sprinkled with seaweed flakes, slathered in Otafuku, that thick, sweet Worcestershire sauce taste-a-like that I could eat by the pail. Decades ago, I earned pocket money making prawn toast in a Chinese restaurant. I have observed the process of bready, prawny, salty, mayo-mixed hunks of carb swimming in pans of oil. This did not stop me, at Shackfuyu, ordering two portions and washing them down with a Sake Cherry Gimlet.

Cocktails are pre-bottled at £7.50 a pop. I’m not a massive fan of this phase. I rather like to see the shaky, rattling process, hear the clink of bottles and enjoy the whole hoopla. Nevertheless, the Ringo Starr — gin, sake and apple juice — had an amicable kick.

We ate, in truth, like rabid maniacs. We ordered the beef picanha in kimchee tare butter. The servers sing about its greatness and they’re not lying. It’s the star attraction. We cleared a sticky, rather orgasmic plate of miso aubergine sprinkled in bubu arare, crispy, puffy rice pellets, the Japanese hinterland between quinoa and Sugar Puffs. The Korean fried wings are bloody hot, even for a chilli fan like myself, and very messy. We ordered fried potatoes with curry sauce because I am from northern England, thus if any menu features chips in a sauce, I’ll order it, eat all of it, and then say, ‘Oh gosh, silly me, were those for sharing? That’s a shame, they’ve all fallen in my mouth.’

Also — small fanfare required here — I’m calling the Kinako French toast the greatest new pudding in London for 2015. A hunk of buttery, syrupy, sticky-middle, crispy-edged, hot-from-the-pan sweet stodge, served with green tea-flavoured Mr Whippy ice cream. Yes, yes, yes! Shackfuyu, your name won’t be slipping my mind again any time soon.

Browse Grace Dent's latest restaurant reviews

1/10

SHACKFUYU

2 Ringo Starr £15

1 Sake Cherry Gimlet £7.50

1 still water £4

2 prawn toast £10.40

1 miso aubergine £5.80

1 curry potatoes £4.30

1 beef picanha £12.50

1 chicken wings £5.90

1 glass Masumi sake £7.70

1 Kinako French toast £6

TOTAL £79.10

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