Just a cook too many

It's ironic that a restaurant named after a style of Japanese poem containing 17 syllables should have a menu that takes longer to read than the complete works of Yukio Mishima.

Although I wasn't quite ready to follow in the path of the famously nihilistic novelist and perform ritual suicide in public, I was beginning to lose the will to live as I worked my way through the 207 menu items.

It takes four separate kitchens to produce the bewildering array of 'Asian tapas' that runs from scallop sashimi with yuzu to Peking barbecue duck via tandoori prawns and chicken yakitori.

But on the Tuesday after Easter in a spookily quiet West End, and with only 20 customers to look after, there was a lot more talking than cooking going on in the ground-floor open kitchen.

Spread over three floors and expensively kitted out in granite and wood, Haiku is a sort of multi-storey Hakkasan but with lower electricity bills.

The lighting is so moodily dim that I could barely make out the first step down to the basement bar, which turned out to be little more than a row of chairs lined up along a corridor leading to the toilets. It was manned by a talkative barman who knew his way around a bottle opener but was completely unfamiliar with the meaning of the word 'kir'.

As our relentlessly chirpy waiter leaned in to talk us through the menu, we got an unappetising whiff of eau-de-tobacco - its presence explained by the almost constant stream of staff who we spotted through the dining room's picture windows nipping outside for a crafty fag.

As all the dishes are small and designed to be shared, we were told to order as we liked. But, like some ominous gatekeeper from a sword-andsorcery computer game, our waiter warned us that, once we crossed over from the lighter dishes on the first page to the heavier dishes that followed, we couldn't go back.

It would have been reasonable enough advice, if it weren't for the fact that the food is delivered in no particular order as and when it is ready. But what arrived at the table was for the most part good. There were enough thin, fresh slices of turbot sashimi with grapefruit ponzu dipping sauce to split between the two of us but dividing up the three skinless grapefruit segments to accompany each mouthful proved to be a challenge.

Four pieces of spider roll sushi with softshell crab were delicious but too large to eat in one go and fell apart after one bite. The frustration continued with a portion of well-made pork pot stickers that came as three large, pan-fried dumplings. No doubt our clumsy attempts to dissect the remaining dumpling with our chopsticks provided some muchneeded entertainment for the underemployed front-of-house team.