A high-end hybrid Oriental restaurant combining Chinese and Japanese cuisines will open next month in the new Four Seasons hotel at Ten Trinity Square in the City of London. Mei Ume, a name bringing together the Chinese and Japanese words for “plum”, launches on June 9, joining star French chef Anne-Sophie Pic’s La Dame de Pic […]
Piccadilly’s long-running Japan Centre is to move into salubrious new premises off Leicester Square in September. Based on the Japanese concept of a “depachika” – the basement food hall in a department store – it will feature a 100-seat dining courtyard, along with specialist rooms offering Japanese teas, sake and miso, the latter available direct from the […]
One of London’s leading Japanese restaurants since it opened in Marylebone in 2006, Dinings is to launch a sister venue in Knightsbridge next month. Dinings SW3 aims to fuse Japanese tradition with European seafood bar culture, offering plateaux de fruits de mer fresh from Cornish dayboats, plus robata-style cuisine using a Josper grill, with a seasonal sake list […]
Zuma, the super-glossy Japanese-fusion haunt that’s a magnet for Knightsbridge eurotrash, has won its High Court battle against a dog-food brand of the same name. Chef Rainer Becker, who founded the restaurant in 2002, initiated the action against the “luxury” pet-food range launched in 2014 by Kingston-based Zoe Vanderbilt. She told the court that the brand was […]
Cotswolds-based MasterChef finalist and former banker Andrew Kojima is opening his first restaurant, Koj, in Cheltenham next week on the back of successful pop-up and crowd-funding campaigns. He trialled the venture – and the Regent Street venue – as a pop-up in the run-up to Christmas, generating enough interest to raise £55,000 from more than 200 backers. […]
Chef and food-writer Gizzi Erskine has teamed up with ramen chain Tonkotsu to produce a Korean-inspired bowl to be sold for six weeks from next Friday, March 17. Her “Twisted Tonkotsu” includes Korean doenjang miso, gochuang chilli and kimchee, along with the house broth, pork belly and whole egg. Erskine’s fried chicken wings will be […]
⦿ In The Observer, Jay Rayner reviewed Aquavit, the St James’s offshoot of an “award-garlanded” Swedish restaurant in New York – “And, oh boy, check out that swagger.” It turned out to be “a proper Nordic noir thriller but for all the wrong reasons… It’s altogether more Trump Tower than Wallander. Everything is shiny and golden […]
The Shoryu chain of ramen bars has opened its first branch outside London, in Manchester’s Piccadilly. Shoryu specialises in tonkotsu ramen based on a 12-hour pork broth, a style developed in the Hakata district of Fukuoka city on the southwest Japanese island of Kyushu. Founder Tak Tokumine, a native of Fukuoka, made his first mark […]
One of central London’s longest-established Japanese restaurants, Matsuri in St James’s, has closed down after 23 years to be replaced by an updated new establishment from the same owner. The teppanyaki and sushi bar has inspired pretty solid feedback for its “authentic” feel from the Harden’s Survey in recent years, but little in the way […]
Chef Scott Hallsworth will usher in the new sake-brewing season at his Chelsea izakaya (Japanese gastro-pub) Kurobuta when he prepares a multi-course dinner in front of diners to serve with sake pairings on Saturday. October 1 is the traditional first day of production in Japan’s thousand-year-old rice-brewing industry, and has more recently been declared World Sake Day. […]