Fay Maschler on Kirazu - restaurant review

"A restaurant slips under the radar, under cover of night, almost sheepishly arriving" … so wrote Zeren Wilson in his sprightly, drink-enlightening blog, Bitten & Written, thereby immediately erasing its low-key positioning and spreading the word. I’m glad he did.

It turns out that Kirazu opened in April this year. Next to rainbow-hued Bubbleology and in the same block as Spuntino, it adopts the latter’s coy visual reticence and puts out no flags. Chef/patron Yuya Kikuchi has steadily worked his way towards owning his own place through stints in Osaka, Brussels, Sydney and for four years in London at Mitsukoshi in Lower Regent Street. Apparently he is licensed to prepare the poisonous fugu (blowfish) — sign of a highly accomplished, trusted chef. But chez lui (well, earlier this year he also laboured for four months in Paris until he felt he had learned everything from there that he needed) he offers obanzai, Kyoto home-style food at modest prices.

Kirazu in the Kansai dialect means beans, here as manifest in soy sauce, miso and tofu, and Yuya is keen to stress their contribution to healthiness and longevity. Unfortunately the tapas word has been borrowed for the menu but it can be ignored or read as shorthand for the understanding of what a modern clientele wants. In addition to “tapas” cold and hot on the printed menu, daily dishes are scrawled on two blackboards.

The restaurant’s interior shows a similar intuitive appreciation of what rocks in today’s Soho. Two long, thumpingly sturdy tables for sharing are flanked by bar stools at ledges, and the wellspring for decoration is ingredients, bottles, wooden crates and tottering towers of beauteous ceramic dishes. Steel coat hangers are currently sculptural shapes hung high against white walls but they will later come into their own to hang salarymen’s jackets.

Prices for dishes kicking off at £2.50 make us insouciant in ordering, but late on a warm evening — because we haven’t booked, which turns out to be quite a fuzzy concept, and are told to come back at 10pm — we concentrate for the most part on the light and vivacious assemblies such as tofu salad with blue perilla (champion for the liver) dressing; Japanese egg white omelet (sic), a rather dutiful assembly; grilled aubergine with sweet miso; spicy minced beef on tofu; flame-seared rice ball with green chilli miso; seared spicy cod’s roe, where the clumps of unadulterated eggs are particularly fine; and takoyaki.

All of you — and sometimes me — out there eating like lab rats in a heart-disease experiment, stuffing your faces with white bread, fatty mince and melted cheese, should take note of takoyaki, first popularised as street food in Osaka. Dry-fried balls of an egg-rich batter enclosing diced octopus, pickled ginger and green onion are dressed with thin ribbons of mayonnaise and a savoury emulsion akin to Worcestershire sauce then crowned with seaweed and shavings and wavings of dried bonito. It is a £3.50 mix of sweet, sharp, smoky, soft and crunchy that is tantalising and mutable but has innocence at its heart.

On a second visit, believing we had made an 8.30pm booking over the phone — fortunately, space soon becomes available at one of the tables — we order takoyaki again. We also try shio (salt) ramen and a selection of items from the blackboard. Although the lightest of the ramen stocks, the broth has a well-developed personality and the noodles are engagingly springy. Hard-boiled egg and slender slices of pork bob in the bowl. Seabream sashimi dressed with sliced radish and black and white sesame seeds is incisive, excellent and something of a bargain at £4.50.

“What is chikuwa?” I ask, eyeing up chikuwa tempura on the board. “A sort of fish” is the reply. It is a sort of fish in the sense that crabsticks are a sort of crab. It is made from surimi, a paste. But veiled in a delicate herb-flecked (or maybe seaweed-flecked) batter, it is a convincing mimic.

Breded (sic) chicken with ponzu sauce is, as we imagined, the meat in crisp crumbs accompanied by a citrus and soy-based dip that wakes it from its fast food slumber.

Kirazu is popular with young hip Japanese. There is a feeling of fun — not always on the menu at Japanese establishments — and when the chef emerges from his kitchen at the back he looks to be enjoying himself. As you do when you achieve a place of your own and it is mainly word-of-mouth that fills it from the start.