Dinings

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The original Dinings on Harcourt Street remains the heart and foundation of the three restaurants acting as a creative hub and test kitchen for new dishes.

The Dinings residency in The Norman Hotel Tel Aviv, offers a simple and relaxed environment with an open-terraced dining space overlooking the city.

Dinings SW3 resides within a Grade I listed building with its own private clients in the heart of London’s Knightsbridge.

The menu offers all of the dishes that Dinings has become renowned for plus a distinct and contemporary blend of dishes including a Japanese take on a ‘Plateu de Fruits de Mer’ as well as robata-style dishes from its Josper oven.

http://dinings.co.uk

Dinings SW3: Restaurant Review - olive magazine

In a nutshell: The second restaurant from Marylebone’s contemporary Japanese restaurant, focusing on traditional izakaya style cuisine with modern European twists.

Restaurant review: After 10 years of fine-tuning its contemporary Japanese offering, tiny Marylebone restaurant Dinings has opened a new spot in a grade-II listed building in Knightsbridge.

Order a cocktail while you peruse the menu of sashimi, sushi and modern Japanese tapas that has evolved from traditional Japanese Izakaya cuisine.

The Dinings martini is a great way to kick things off, combining umeboshi (a sweet and sour Japanese pickled plum) with oil made from shiso (Japanese mint).

Menu must-order: The nasu miso grilled aubergine, slow-cooked in sweet miso, was so deeply caramelised and rich in umami that we ordered a second for pre-dessert.

Dinings: restaurant review - Telegraph

B tells me that for all their spanking-fresh, low-fat reputation, most Japanese people's favourite food is actually curry rice, which is rice and a load of curry sauce on top.

Chiba is pioneering what he calls Japanese tapas - in fact, many small sushis and sashimis and rolls, much as you'd already understand by the umbrella term 'sushi'.

B and I did you the favour of ordering basically everything - a nigiri sushi and sashimi combination plate (£14.50), a salmon and salmon-egg donburi (£13.95), a chicken teriyaki donburi (£12.50) and some tempura shrimps (£4.75) - bearing in mind that both donburis came with miso soup, rice and mixed tempura.

The sushi and sashimi were typical - salmon, tuna, sea bass and mackerel sashimi, all very dainty and beautiful, all delicious.

The sushi roll was really something else; a small and improbably tasty bit of salmon nestling in the middle, which turned out to be salmon collar (the part between the gills and the first fins - you can tell by the intensity, apparently, or, if you're unsure, the smallness), was underscored by some unusually boisterous avocado, wrapped in rice, wrapped in seaweed.

Dinings restaurant review 2010 November London | Japanese ...

Some smaller dishes were under £3 while larger dishes courses cost around £11 or so, and included various Japanese styles from sushi through to tempura, with a hint of fusion with western influences in places.

Perhaps the dish of the meal was yellowtail with uzu garlic dressing and a little caviar: the yellowtail was of very good quality without a hint of chewiness, and the citrus dressing was just the right balance for the sashimi (15/20).

The bill came to £39 a head with a little beer, which did not seem bad given that we had ordered some extra dishes to supplement the standard lunch offerings.

What follows are notes from my first experience at Dinings, a lunch at the bar in July 2010 Tuna sushi was pleasant, the temperature of the rice just a little cooler than the room temperature that one genrally encounters in Japan, but nice enough (13/20).

Service was from waiters bringing dishes rather than directly from the chefs behind the sushi counter (there is a separate kitchen adjoining this), and was perfectly pleasant.

Dinings, London

Grace Dent reviews Dinings SW3: The sort of food that puts one off ...

Moments like this cause me to invoke one of my top restaurant critic role models; the angry velociraptor from Jurassic Park who arrives during the Jell-O course and attempts to eat two children.

These included freshwater eel and pan-fried foie gras sushi roll, and four pieces of hay-seared toro tataki topped with dashi-flavoured foie gras mousse and kizami wasabi for a bargain £18.95.

We began with tar-tar chips (Japanese for tiny tasteless taco) topped with room-temperature toro fatty tuna and jalapeño mayonnaise, then two with native lobster, equally warm and bushtucker challenge-ish.

A langoustine had been halved and Josper grill-tormented until it had no discernable texture before plainly awful things arrived, like weird turds of seared Wagyu beef tataki with porcini ponzu, or annoyances of Scottish salmon ‘zuke style’ with onion soy jam.

We moved on to nasu miso grilled aubergine with sweet miso, which was half an aubergine so sweet my back teeth stung, slung on to a plate without fanfare, then bizarre chunks of inedible watery tofu in an uma-dashi sauce.

Dinings | Restaurants in Marylebone, London

Dinings has a reputation larger than its compact Marylebone setting for great (and pricey) Japanese food with innovative flourishes.

Getting a table in the basement is unlikely without a booking, but if you’re lucky there may be a spare stool at the street-level sushi counter.

Nobu-esque curved potato ‘tar-tar’ chips filled with minced fatty tuna, avocado and wasabi/jalapeño sauce offered an inviting taster of the style.

Presented on a long platter, a lunchtime sushi selection (good value at £23) tasted every bit as good as it looked.

Another lunch dish of pork ‘shabu shabu’ saw ready-cooked slices of tender pork balanced atop a heap of sticky rice and dressed with spicy fermented Korean sauce gochujang – despite the pungent mix, it wasn’t overpowering.