Bit of a wave to go at Tsunami

This review was first published in January 2002

Even before the first reviews came trickling in about Tsunami in Clapham, I'd been nagging the powers that be about covering it. 'We've already done it,' I was told (it turned out to be an entirely different establishment in the City ).

So by the time we got round to it, I was in the unusual position of having been subjected to rather a lot of column inches on the subject of this new(ish) nouveau-Japanese restaurant in SW4. 'Better than Nobu ,' they said; food so good they wanted to eat it all over again'. I couldn't wait.

The first thing that strikes you is the look: it seems that post-Wagamama, there's a rule dictating all Japanese restaurants should have the same bare, stripped-down feel - dark wood tables, white walls, open stainless steel kitchen. BW (Before Wagamama), sushi establishments in outposts such as King's Cross and Tottenham Court Road were sepulchral dives, populated by po-faced poker players. Nowadays, it's all so antiseptic and there's a self-consciously trendy clientele - the guy next to us looked like a refugee from Deee-Lite.

Reflecting chef Singi Nakamura's Nobu and Ubon background, the menu is rather complex and unstructured: there are appetiser and specials sections, but also bentosset meals, tempura by the piece, sushi, sashimi and rolls, both cut and hand-rolled.

The temptation is to go hell for leather and just order a whole load of it, which is how we came to spend nearly £120 for two. And I'm very glad we did: service, though singularly charming, was deathly slow; we built up quite an appetite between courses and left, despite our multiple orders, still feeling peckish.

And, you know what, it's not all that. What was described as mint tea duck was wafer thin slices of - good, tender - duck, alternated with papery slices of nashi, that character-free Oriental pear; its miso plum honey sauce was sweet and tangy but any flavour of mint tea was almost totally absent. Firm, meaty prawns came wrapped in a Weetabix affair (Greek kataifi pastry, more commonly used for sweetmeats) with a pointless frizz of deep-fried butternut squash and creamy sauce reminiscent of Thousand Island dressing. Tempuraed sweet potato and shrimps was fine: feathery batter, excellent miso soupy dip.

Things then took a turn for the worse: my fillet of beef with balsamic teriyaki was a tough and woefully stringy piece of meat, the sauce oversweet and gloopy; while 'scallop's (sic) flambèe in whisky' was one solitary crustacean, swathed in an unpleasantly onomatopoeic roe called smelt and no discernible whiff of whisky. This little number cost a mickey-taking £10.50.

We waited and waited for our sushi but, apart from the truly excellent rice, it was disappointing. Yellowtail, a delicate, subtle fish, had an offputtingly grey pallor; rainbow roll, an eel-shaped arrangement of varied-hued fish, was fine; a California-type roll with deep-fried soft-shell crab was terrific. But a hand-roll contained tuna so fishy it seemed well past its sushi sell-by. Everything suffered from a sinus-clearing overdose of wasabi.

A direct Nobu steal of chocolate fondant with green tea ice cream featured in an unremarkable pudding and a downright nasty ice: thick and waxy in texture, it brought to mind frozen avocado face-pack. I guess it all goes to show - and you're welcome to treat this the same way - that you can't always believe everything you read.