Kikuchi

14 Hanway Street London W1T 1UD - 020-7637-7720

Kikuchi Japanese Restaurant

https://www.kikuchisushi.com

Cheese and Biscuits: Kikuchi, Fitzrovia

So a good Japanese restaurant in London is to be praised and cherished, and enjoyed by as many people as possible.

Kikuchi, round the back of Tottenham Court Road, is one such place - our very own slice of Tokyo serving some of London's best sushi, an experience so profoundly authentic, from service to décor to food, that if it weren't for the fact the toilets didn't have a panel of flashing buttons on them and the bill came in pounds sterling, you really could believe you were 6,000 miles away.

Our "omakase" (surprise tasting) menu began with mackerel-wrapped cucumber and seaweed, good fresh fish and a pretty presentation, to be dipped in to an umami-rich mustard and miso sauce.

Sushi like this is why you'd come to a restaurant like Kikuchi, in fact food this good is why one eats out at all.

But Kikuchi (and Tetsu, and probably Araki although not being a gazillionaire I doubt I'll ever go) is proof that producing a truly top-end dining experience is, in common with any type of restaurant, just a matter of getting a group of talented people together in a room and letting them do their thing.

Kikuchi: Framed blades, £8-toro and slimy tuna. | London Eater

The cosy restaurant decor is largely anonymous and modest, white paint and wooden furnishings, not dissimilar to many of the sushi bars across London really.

The selection included all the good stuff, salmon, unagi, ikura, (sweet sweet) scallops, turbot, tuna, yellowtail, squid and mackerel, at an average of £2 per nigiri, it is better priced, but still for a set selection, seems expensive since I didn’t feel the illusion of making a saving.

My report of the Atari-ya sushi bar in Swiss Cottage] being the pre-eminent supplier of pre-frozen sashimi grade fish in London.

But then I think about the fact that I could have three of these at the sushi bar at Golder’s Green (£2.30 each) for nearly the same amount of money, and also characteristically buttery too, and I feel that the pricing at Kikuchi is a touch indulgent.

If you’re looking for a hidden sushi bar in central London, you should add this to your list.

Kikuchi - London Restaurant Reviews | Hardens

London's most authentic Japanese Restaurant? Kikuchi Reviewed ...

But when it comes to quality Japanese fayre, in the UK, you go to places like Kikuchi.

Down Hanway Street, a dank little alley behind Tottenham Court Road (which you avoid walking alone post midnight), where you will also find the original Hakkasan, step into Owner Chef Masayuki Kikuchi’s fine establishment.

White paint, wooden furniture, space for 16 covers and to the right is the sushi counter behind which Chef Kikuchi is filleting, creating, bustling, working on his small masterpieces.

Chef Kikuchi’s wife was serving the 7 courses, soft spoken, elegantly delivered with complete precision.

Before the final course was miso soup with jumbo prawn, and then a final platter of sashimi including otoro, squid, yellowtail, salmon roe, japanese omelette.

kikuchi | gourmet traveller

My first stop there was for a midweek catch-up with E (being half-Japanese she is always my first port of call when trying a new Japanese spot) and an enjoyable evening (plus a £5 loyalty voucher) spurred me to make last Friday’s dinner reservation for myself and B. I hadn’t intended to lump the accounts of both meals together, but I had left the first half-written for so long that a joint review seemed the sensible route to take.

Kikuchi is known mainly for its sashimi, and the raw fish dishes I sampled on both evenings were indeed remarkably fresh.

Besides sushi and sashimi, the restaurant’s deep-fried items appeared to be highly popular with the punters, and over the two nights I sampled a fair few of them.

Most Japanese restaurants don’t have a huge selection of desserts, and Kikuchi is no exception, offering only ice cream (three flavours) for afters.

But with Sakana-tei only a 15-minute walk away – which in my opinion offers higher quality sashimi (with a wider selection that often includes rarities such as conch, abalone and giant clam), consistently good food (their sunomono is impeccable) and a considerably more relaxed dining experience – I really have no reason to return anytime soon.

Kikuchi - London Restaurant Reviews | Hardens

Jay Rayner reviews Kikuchi, London | Life and style | The Guardian

Kikuchi 14 Hanway Street, London, W1 020 7637 7720 Meal for two including wine and service, £100 There is only one thing worse than bad cheap sushi and that is bad expensive sushi.

But if we exclude acts of physical violence and the crappy little tunes of that crappy little Irish git with the obese caterpillar eyebrows and stick to the business of Japanese food, the only thing worse than bad cheap sushi is, as I say, the bad expensive stuff.

The restaurant I wanted, I was told by knowledgeable friends, was Kikuchi in Hanway Street just off Tottenham Court Road - the sort of dank, hidden alley that TS Eliot might have been thinking of when he wrote in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock of "certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats of restless nights..." Hanway Street is the kind of place you go for a quiet nervous breakdown, to contract a notifiable disease or, as it turns out, for very good sushi.

Their selection of sushi, at £24 for 12 pieces - two-thirds the Buddha Bar price and 10 times as good - brought sweet scallop and silky strips of otoro (belly tuna), a little turbot and some mackerel, some slippery, ripely female sea urchin and jewel-bright orange salmon eggs that burst pleasingly against the roof of the mouth.

You go to Kikuchi for spankingly good fish and sweet waitresses who know their spoken English is close to unintelligible and will do everything to make you feel at home.

Jugemu | Restaurants in Soho, London

A sushi restaurant from Yuya Kikuchi, formerly of Kirazu.

The still-warm sushi rice was plump, sticky-yet-not-sticky perfection, which the sushi snobs among you will know is no mean feat.

Best of all – and the reason for his urgency – the seaweed (nori) was still crisp and brittle: that inevitable ‘sog’ hadn’t yet set in.

The seaweed salad was as good as it gets, as was the beef tataki, but if you really want to put the ‘ooh’ in ‘umami’ then get the tomato with wasabi: a bowl of firm tommies, confetti-scattered with flakes of bonito and micro-strips of nori, plus a soupy wasabi-laced sweet-soy dressing at its base.

Then order a few of the (warm) street food snacks, from all-the-rage takoyaki (deep-fried balls of octopus-studded batter, topped with two-tone blobs of mayo and tangy takoyaki sauce), or the bonito flake rice balls.