If only looks could fill

When Michelin published its first-ever guide to Tokyo recently, it scattered stars like an over-excited child with confetti. Tokyo is now officially the best place to eat in the world. Like we didn't know that already.

Japanese food has been a form of gourmet one-upmanship since forever. Whaddya mean, you've never dined at an underground restaurant in Ginza with only one table, a petrifiying sushi chef and a collection of unidentifiable slimy objects, one of which you suspect might be the crab gut putty you swerved to avoid outside Tsukiji fish market? Call yourself a foodie?

Anybody who's ever trawled round the Japanese megalopolis feels it's their divine right to pontificate that we don't have anything in London to touch Tokyo. Which is, of course, exactly what I'm about to do.

There has been a mega-buzz about Sakenohana since its much-delayed opening late last year, marked by a party clotted with the likes of Joan Collins, Elton John and David Walliams. It's under the aegis of restaurant maven Alan Yau (Hakkasan, Busaba Eathai, Wagamama) with backing from the Russian super-rich, specifically Evgeny Lebedev, whose claim to fame is a brief moment with Geri Halliwell.

It looks amazing - much better than it did when it was Che or the hilariously ill-judged Sino-Italian folly, Shumi. You enter via a dramatic, shiny black lobby and sail up one of two escalators, getting a frisson of glittery drama.

Upstairs, the look is very Super Potato (Roka and Zuma's interior designers) in what's becoming almost shorthand for contemporary Japanese.

The whole place is clad in expensive, natural materials, with a riot of slatted pale wood, which tries to make sense of the room's notoriously ungainly shape (avoid the Siberia round the corner by the toilets like the plague). There are faux-tatami tables with sunken wells so you don't have to kneel, but you do have to take off your shoes, as do waitstaff.

It's like the offspring of Tokyo's contemporary kaiseki joint Waketokuyama (also designed by Sakenohana architect Kengo Kuma) and the Hyatt Regency Kyoto (designed - surprise, surprise - by Super Potato).

The menu takes no prisoners; even for Japanese food fans, it's impenetrable. Contrarily translating tsukuri as sashimi, for instance, means you're compelled to fall on the mercy of the gorgeous, designer-garbed staff. It's also thoroughly Japanese, with none of the evolution or tweaks we've come to expect from this kind of operation.

Still, you'd be hard pushed to find a menu like this in the homeland. 'It's kaiseki,' explains our waitress. Actually, no, it isn't that mannered Japanese haute cuisine but a weird hybrid of sushi joint, ryotei (upscale, discreet and recherché restaurant for dignitaries) and izakaya (drinking den).