Blackfriars, Japanese Restaurant Guide

“Love the udon, sitting at the single long counter” – Japan’s most refined fast-food noodle option (whose popularity dates from the early Edo period 400 years ago), is showcased at this 15-year-old Soho fixture and its satellites in the City’s Bloomberg Arcade and Hackney. “Best to go at an off-peak time to avoid the queue”.

This 15-strong London noodle chain (now with branches in Brighton, Birmingham and Bristol) is “a good stand-by” – perhaps it’s “not as good as some of its competitors”, but it is widely seen as “good value”: in particular “the lunch-time meal deal” is a winner.

Spanning the eighth and ninth floors of what was once the Daily Telegraph’s (and more recently Goldman Sachs’s) Fleet Street HQ, this ritzy new pan-Asian fusion rooftop is set to open in late 2025. It’s one of three planned for Regis’s new mixed-use development of the site, with restos from brothers Arian and Alberto Zandi (owners of Emerald Hospitality, who run Como Garden, Zuaya, etc). This one will major in Japanese cuisine – with a dedicated sushi counter and open robata grill – but also with Thai and Chinese dishes. The ninth-floor rooftop terrace will adjoin a bar overlooking the nearby cityscape.

At the top of New Fetter Lane in Holborn, this specialist in Japanese yakitori – serving different cuts of chicken grilled on skewers – opened in autumn 2024. Billing itself ‘beak-to-tail’ dining, its offering incorporates a full blow-out of 17 cuts, which requires 48 hours’ notice. In his May 2025 review, the FT’s Jay Rayner declared it “as if each skewer is the very best part of the Sunday roast that you were holding out for” – and the equal of its type to any he had tried when visiting Tokyo.