Aaya W1

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From Gary Yau, a path-breaking restaurant, bringing high-quality Japanese fare (including top-quality sushi) and striking design values to Soho; it’s no bargain, but standards on our early-days visit were uniformly very high.

It’s rare for a major new central restaurant to steal up on the world the way this new establishment has, and all the more striking when the restaurant concerned is owned by Gary Yau (brother of Alan, one of the most justly celebrated London restaurateurs of our times). This Soho newcomer, however, has been the subject of a very successful anti-PR campaign.

Perhaps they just didn’t want to spoil the surprise: this is a sort of place simply never before seen in Soho. Your classic Soho Japanese is a low-rent affair, perhaps offering good value, but not in the sort of surroundings that are ever going to find themselves in a design magazine.

Not so here. You could accurately describe the setting as one of undraped tables in a room mainly decorated with blonde wood, but that little conveys the overall impression, which is of a grand dining chamber – feeling almost as if it were hewn from marble – of a type you rarely find in even the most salubrious parts of London. It helps that the architect has ‘found’ a rare degree of height for the main dining room: if it were not for the small-scale streetscape visible outside, one would imagine oneself in SoHo NYC.

Also very different from a classic Soho oriental is the pricing policy. 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. There are no opening bargains here. The aim is clearly a ‘serious’ Japanese restaurant, as well as an elegant – if informal – one, but the burden of overweening ‘concept’ which arguably oppresses brother Alan’s even more upmarket Sake No Hana is absent.

On our lunchtime visit, we sampled sashimi, maki sushi, tempura, miso soup and a jelly and ice cream pudding. Everything was notably fresh and tastes were vibrant. Presentation was intricate, but in a clean contemporary style that managed to feel not at all overwrought. For a restaurant so recently opened, service was remarkably ‘together’ too.

If you spend your time following the London restaurant scene, it’s easy to become a little jaded by the pursuit of the latest, greatest thing, which turns out to be nothing of the sort. But what a city we live in when a restaurant like this can open – on a major Soho thoroughfare – without anyone even knowing it’s coming.