Sake no Hana

Sake no Hana offers modern authentic Japanese dining featuring charcoal grill, toban and kamameshi dishes, sushi and sashimi.

Sake no Hana – modern authentic Japanese cuisine

http://www.sakenohana.com

About - London

Restaurant Review: Sake No Hana | The Soulmates Blog

A simple dish – thinly sliced yellow tail with hints of a truffle ponzu sauce and freshly pickled wasabi to really pull out the flavour of the fish.

We also had the Chilean sea bass with a homemade champagne yuzu miso sauce, which had a light subtle taste to it, perfectly accompanying the delicate fish and champagne.

Personally I felt the mango was overpowering and the matcha to be quite a subtle taste, but the dish overall was light and crisp.

My date went for the chocolate and toasted rice delice, a delicious mix of chocolate mousse, toasted rice canteen and miso caramel sauce.

The miso caramel sauce, similar to salted caramel, was just stunning in the flavour it delivered to the dish, and certainly a great way to pull in modern and authentic Japanese flavours.

Sake No Hana restaurant review 2007 December London ...

Most tables, including the one we were shown to, is kotatsu style eating i.e. you have to take you shoes off, and then lever yourself into a table sunken into a pit in the floor, each table having a little heater under the seats.

This does not seem to the aim here, with the menu set out in sections that will be entirely unfamiliar to anyone who has not eaten Japanese food and to many who have e.g. “Tsuki dashi” are tiny snacks (in fact more usually a move in sumo wrestling, but given the context here tiny snacks, but described by the waitress as “salads”).

King crab and cucumber salad was a very small bowl of crab meat with a little sliced cucumber, and was pleasant enough (13/20).

Yamaino somen was mountain yam, sliced finely rather like noodles, with a little parcel of salmon roe and a tiny piece of wasabi root and a dipping sauce of dashi (the universal stock in Japan, made from kelp and dried bonito).

One oddity on the menu was Chilean seabass with miso, which given all the other efforts at authenticity seemed peculiar (Chilean seabass is neither Chilean nor sea bass, being the re-marketed Patagonoian toothfish, and is in my view a rather dull tasting fish, but more to the point is hardly traditional Japanese).

Sake No Hana, London SW1, restaurant review - Telegraph

The only demonstrable error was that the dish was still very hot, so when they poured the soy-based sauce over it the whole thing immediately smelt and tasted like burnt soy sauce, which is disgusting.

I carried on with the iron-pot black cod rice (£19), and everything about this – the taste, heat, textures – was great.

The rice was sticky with gorgeous burnt bits at the bottom, and the egg, cod and spring onion all chimed in with different intensity and texture.

There wasn't a tremendous amount of fish, but perversely that marked an improvement on the traditional black cod; a whole fillet coated in sticky barley miso can be daunting.

Start with hand-made vegetable gyoza dumplings (£3.95 for five) before moving on to prawn tempura with rice (£12.95) Squeeze into this tiny café for a cockle-warming bowl of home-style pork shoyu ramen (£6.50) or try the cone-shaped crab temaki (£4 for two) on Thursday sushi nights.

Restaurant review: Sake No Hana, St James's Street, London SW1 ...

Sake No Hana is an attempt by Alan Yau, the man behind Hakkasan and Wagamama, to gift London a high-end Japanese restaurant.

Sake No Hana occupies a site that was once Shumi, a restaurant of such awe-inspiring stupidity it's a wonder those involved were not arrested for crimes against food.

Our waitress described Sake No Hana as a kaiseki restaurant - referencing a style of multi-course meals - and the menu follows the traditional structure, starting with small plates and working through sashimi to grilled, via deep-fried and braised to sushi.

A tiddly tranche of yellowtail teriyaki for £15 was a dud - merely dark and salty rather than the sweet, buttery thing it should be.

The fact is that Sake No Hana is more a take on the kaiseki restaurant than the real thing.

Sake No Hana | Restaurants in St James', London

As you’d expect from the Hakkasan restaurant group, Sake No Hana is well designed and has slick service: a combination that means the striking yet serene dining room plays host to many a business lunch from the Economist’s offices round the corner.

On a midweek lunchtime visit there were also a number of well-heeled families enjoying the range of contemporary Japanese dishes.

A four-course ‘Taste of Sake No Hana’ (£29) proved a filling meal, with miso soup, a choice of sukiyaki, tempura or grilled dish, a handful of sushi and a dessert.

A coating of tempura batter pieces added interest to an avocado and red pepper inside-out roll; and a selection of ice-cream mochi wedges, presented in a circle like the petals of a flower, rounded off the meal well.