Keeping up with the Nobus

What is London's-most intimidating-restaurant? For those mortals who harbour the modest hope of eating a decent meal in relaxed surroundings, there are plenty of candidates.

There are ultra-formal French jobs, where you risk being thrown out if you lay a finger on your own wine bottle, and the stuffier, old-world Brit ones, like the Savoy Grill, Claridge's and the Ritz, where the need for propriety is enough to make the Lord Chancellor feel underdressed.

But for a different type of terror, surely Nobu takes the biscuit. For a start, the food is Japanese, so unless you're au fait with that country's almost competitive culture of self-abasement, you feel gauche even before you cross its Park Lane threshold.

When you do so, you feel inadequate if you're not at least three of the following: a) wearing black b) tall and angular c) Tom Cruise d) Kate Moss.

The staff are charm itself, and the food, it hardly needs saying, is exquisite, but the place is still terrifying. The menu doesn't settle the nerves, either. What is oshinko? Or tataki? Ponzu? Tiradito? Inaniwa? Moromi miso? Chi ra su? How many people must have blushed, having asked "What is matsuhisa?", to be told that it is the chef, Nobu Matsuhisa?

For those who don't have friends in the charmed circle to explain, it's a nightmare. If you can imagine the arrival of a hefty bill (around £70 a head) being a blessed relief, that can happen at Nobu.

So it is good to learn that there's some rather more informal competition at the top end of the Japanese market on the way. In April, Sumosan is to open a few blocks away in Albemarle Street, on the site of Coast. "We don't want to say we are taking on Nobu," says co-owner Janina Wolkow, "but we do think there is room for a more modestly priced top quality Japanese restaurant. We want people to feel comfortable and not threatened when they come to eat at Sumosan," says Janina. "We'll make sure the menus have full explanations of what we are offering."

They seem to have the right credentials. Wolkow, 25, is the formidably determined daughter of German-based restaurateur Alexander Wolkow. (If the name sounds familiar, it is. It's like being called John Smith. There are 178 Alexander Wolkows in the Moscow phone book.) He was born in the Ukraine but left Soviet Russia penniless for Berlin in the 1970s. While his wife waitressed, he opened a snack bar. Hard work took him through a succession of businesses before the political climate in Russia changed sufficiently for him to invest in Moscow.

He still lives in Germany but is quick to defend Russia against the charge that the only people who can do business in Moscow are mafiosi. In a city where street crime flourishes and there is no middle class, only rich and aggrieved poor, few self-respecting businessmen travel without an ostentatious display of "protection". But old-timers recognise that the City - partly thanks to Vladimir Putin's rule - has lost a good deal of its Wild West feel of the early 1990s.

In 1997, out of the blue, Wolkow's daughter - whom he had always assumed wouldn't like raw fish - suggested that the Russian capital could do with a decent Japanese restaurant. As a surprised but indulgent father, he went along with it, setting up 50 covers in the Radisson Hotel. It was a great success, and he was in heaven. "At the age of 47 I had discovered my metier. It was what I was born to do," says Wolkow, who now owns four Japanese restaurants in Moscow and eats little but Japanese food - in large quantities.