Grace and Flavour

Some of us are born to love sashimi; the rawer, the wobblier, the more recently alive, the more festooned in crystalline jelly and titivated with ponzu truffle or foie gras the better. These people will adore Yashin Sushi, a fine dining establishment for people who gaze upon a platter of uncooked flesh, shimmering skin, vivid capillaries and blowholes and say, 'Blimey, that looks yummy. Let's have it with a delicious bowl of runny hand-made tofu garnished with yet more jelly, plus a teacup of smoky glistening orange salmon caviar pustules!'

Me, not so much. Eating anything so raw that a jumpstart from a vet could have it starring in Finding Nemo feels instinctively wrongheaded, although it's worth putting a pin in this emotion temporarily just to experience chef's Omakase nigiri and sushi combinations, featuring whatever inspires him that day: spiked salmon, razor clam, botan prawn, otoro tuna with sake paste, excellent meaty mackerel. If you sit at the bar, you can observe all the titivation, rice cracker-crumb sprinkling and blowtorch drama. A neon sign on the wall warns diners against asking for soy sauce for dipping. For those truly intolerant of rawness, Yashin Sushi proffers a few hot dishes such as Wagyu sushi ('It's a bit Fray Bentos pie,' I said. This was not an insult) and tempura shrimp roll (one large shelled tail sticking out of neatly wrapped rice).

Yashin Sushi is packed with plump-walleted sushi lovers looking for top-grade, modern, innovative sushi, who can't face Nobu and its scrum of WAGs. These thirty-something stockbrokers and their yummy-mummy accomplices sit at the bar, her picking at warm edamame, him muttering into a BlackBerry, pausing only to knock back oysters.

And it will drain your bank account more efficiently than any other restaurant I know. Call me fussy, but if I spend £130 on dinner, I want to feel that if a bus squashed me on the way home, the coroner would be able to tell I'd recently eaten. But not so at Yashin Sushi: 'This woman was starving!' he'd mutter. 'Her iPhone says her last call was to Domino's for a 14in pizza.' Nothing from Domino's arrives topped with ponzu jelly. Some might argue that Domino's is the poorer for it.

YASHIN SUSHI
1a Argyll Road, W8 (020 7938 1536; yashinsushi.com)