Vittles Reviews: The timeless allure of mid-range sushi
Vittles Reviews: The timeless allure of mid-range sushi
Opening the doors of the most fiercely gatekept sushi spots in London, by Jonathan Nunn
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Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read all the previous reviews here.
The timeless allure of mid-range sushi
Opening the doors of the most fiercely gatekept sushi spots in London, by Jonathan Nunn
No genre of restaurant is more fiercely gatekept than the better-than-it-needs-to-be, mid-range, local sushi spot. Lunchtime sushi chains serving refrigerated California rolls for £10 a head? Ten a penny. Splurging on a £400 omakase at a Mayfair sushi counter? Common as muck, if you can afford it. But a place serving sushi within a ten-minute walk of your home or workplace, run by a couple who know your name and ask after the family, where the rice is warm and the fish is immaculate, and where you won't spend more than £40 on dinner? This is the kind of rare institution for which omerta was invented.
What the mid-level sushi spot offers that the others don’t is value: a cardinal virtue in dwindling supply in London but abundant in cities like Tokyo, where department store sushi can still kick the arse of London restaurants serving something similar and charging twice as much. When you find these unicorns, they’ll often occupy the most unassuming real estate, taking advantage of the minimal prep space that sushi production requires. At the pioneering branches of Atariya, the fish supplier turned sushi bar where I first tried good sushi, you essentially ate on the shop floor surrounded by wholesale bags of rice and the faintly marine aroma of fresh fish; meanwhile, the location of the sushi restaurant Sagamiya – around the back of the former Greater London Council’s County Hall, opposite the London Eye – may be the grungiest approximation of Osaka you’ll come across in the centre of the city. Some of these obscure but excellent sushi bars have been so successfully gatekept that, one day, they stopped being there: Sushi Hiro, once described as 'the best kept secret in London' sadly shut a few years ago; while the existence of Fujifoods, a sushi-ya run by an elderly couple in High Barnet, was so closely guarded by my friend Jessica that by the time she thought to tell me about it they had announced they were retiring.
But unicorns do exist…