Best tempura at sake no hana

Life always throws up imponderables. Having stormed to victory, why is Boris ironing out the just-got-out-of-bed look? What deludes the Duchess of York and Cherie Blair into thinking they can change people’s opinion of them? Why are the Japanese so thin? Think about it: a lardy native from the Land of the Rising Sun is as rare as an English win at Wimbledon. Since nobody could explain why, I popped along to Sake No Hana to find out for myself.

Unusually, this newish venue is set in the heart of clubby and art-galleried St James’s. We have Muscovite socialite Evgeny Lebedev to thank for Sake No Hana. Not for him football teams or bling art but a venture into the competitive London eating scene. Brave man.

From the outside, Sake No Hana isn’t particularly welcoming. The huge tinted windows give the exterior a slightly sinister feel, and inside, the reception area is very dark. It’s one of those places where staff cluster around you as soon as you walk in, like MPs who’ve spotted a passing freebie or a camera on Parliament Square. Immaculate, black-clad staff wear uniforms made by someone called Naoki Takizawa that manage to fudge the line between fashion victim and fashion statement. I was meeting my friend the actress who, oddly, had never eaten Japanese food before and finds any new experience ‘inspirational’.

To reach the restaurant itself, you have to travel up a long, narrow escalator (no fattie would ever fit on it), a surreal feeling that is only magnified when you step into a vast, silent arena of an eating space. It is devoid of decoration. Bamboo blinds shut out the world and huge wooden slatted constructions give the feeling of being inside a giant box of Jenga.

The slightly dreamlike sensation increases when a member of staff glides over and asks us to remove our shoes. ‘But my toenails are peeling!’ hissed the actress in horror. Fortunately, I was wearing a favourite pair of cashmere socks. But then I had to clamber on to a platform in order to sit on a cushion. It was a self-conscious moment for a six-foot-plus bloke with a bad back.

But my cushion was surprisingly comfortable and as I sipped from a thimbleful of sake, I began to relax. The menu is long and varied, and while some dishes may sound familiar, they are executed in a way that is entirely new. You can have something called unagi wakame sunomono, which sounds like an African dictator but is, in fact, a cucumber seaweed salad. Hmm. Instead, we opted for lotus root and king crab with cucumber – which was interesting if not exactly moreish.

Tempura was more familiar ground for both of us, and a crisp kaleidoscope of seasonal vegetables proved to be the best tempura we’d ever eaten. Next came soft-shell crab with mizuna and shimeji, which delighted my guest, though she thought she tasted mayonnaise. ‘But that’s probably why I like it,’ she added darkly.

We moved on to wagyu beef with konnyaku, and the actress got very excited, telling me the cattle are hand-massaged by humans to make their flesh tender. ‘Which is more than I get,’ she declared, since her love life is in its usual state of disarray. As it happened, the beef was disappointing.

We finished with black cod rice, the restaurant’s signature dish – and you can see why. It arrives in a Macbeth witches-type of pot – all hubble-bubble and steam – with a chunk of fish sitting atop sticky rice and miso. Our waitress proceeded to mash up the whole lot so it resembled a dinner a child had been playing with, but it tasted incredible.

It’s such a big restaurant that customers sitting at their bare, low tables tend to look like rafts floating on a colourless sea. Watching other diners awkwardly clambering on to cushions makes for good spectator sport and made us feel slightly less inept. The service was faultless and the many staff make you feel completely cosseted. That, I suspect, is what you’re paying for. So why are the Japanese so thin? Because they eat the sort of food that would never make you ask for seconds. And because the very act of removing your shoes and sitting on the floor makes you focus on your body.

Sake No Hana
St. James's Street, London, SW1A 1HA