The ambitious Soho Japanese restaurant Aaya W1 has called in the administrators, reports the Evening Standard.
It’s too early to say whether the restaurant will survive. Especially with the benefit of hindsight, it was a ‘brave’ opening, with all that that implies. Upmarket oriental openings have not particularly been the vogue in recent times, and that part of Soho was not an obvious location for a restaurant with aspirations.
In these circumstances, it might have been a counsel of prudence to generate custom first, and try to ratchet the prices up a bit in due course. Yet the restaurant, run by Alan Yau’s brother Gary, seem almost wilfully to have adopted the opposite course: in our own (positive) review of last May, we wrote that wine prices “tend, somewhat unnervingly, towards a tenner a glass – rather than a bottle – and, even at lunch, you could easily spend £50 a head in total”.
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