Restaurant review: MAI SUSHI (Kings Cross)

Eat Tokyo is my favourite Japanese restaurant in London. Their dishes are marvellous, so reasonably priced, and their meals are both flavourful and healthy. Because of this, I've dined there over ten times, and it's become my go-to Japanese place when I don't feel like researching other places.

Concerned that Eat Tokyo was becoming my favourite due to my own laziness and inertia, I decided to scope out its competition. As part of my job, I have tutorials for professional actuarial qualifications in Kings Cross, and I saw that Mai Sushi, which has a very salubrious TripAdvisor rank of being a top 1,300 restaurant in over 19,000 in London, was located in the vicinity of where my classes were. Thus, I decided it would be rude not to go there for lunch one day.

To start, I had veggie tempura. It was nice, but for £6.50, the structural integrity of it could have been more precise, robust (John Wick Chapter 2 reference, ehehe). You get roughly the same quantity of food for the same price at Eat Tokyo, and the one at Eat Tokyo is much more satisfying.

There were a few sushi boats on the menu at Mai Sushi. On one of my countless revisits to Eat Tokyo, I had actually tried a boat once, pictured in the centre below:

There's something about a whole lot of sushi, all laid out together, that I just can't resist, and the quality of the salmon at Eat Tokyo is unparalleled.

OOTD: new haircut

With the sun finally hitting the UK, I decided my long hair of previous was getting too unmanageable, and thus, in trimming it, I've gone from Alicia Vikander in The Light Between Oceans length to Jessica Chastain in Miss Sloane length! And, in keeping consistent with the Chastain look, I've duly painted my nails black, like Liz Sloane had!

Dress: Marietta dress from Hobbs

Earrings: Amazon

Glasses: Red or Dead

The Marietta dress is now  the third dress from Hobbs I own (the other two: un et deux). Their dresses are perfect for the kind of aesthetic I'm going for at work: elegant and demure.

I find clothes definitely help with the 'fake it 'til you make it' mentality, by which I mean, even if I'm in a sub-optimal mood, if I'm at least sharply dressed at work, I feel better about myself. This then helps to improve my frame of mind, and how I carry out my work.

Mark Twain absolutely nailed it when he said 'clothes make the man'.

Restaurant review: KOUZU (Belgravia)

I bought a voucher to dine at Kouzu on BuyAGift. The restaurant fancies itself an upmarket Japanese restaurant, and the deal retails at £49 ordinarily, so I will be assessing it as if I paid this amount for the deal (in fact, I got a fair bit off the price due to a discount code, but I’m aware discount codes don’t occur all the time).

The starters were perfunctory. With regards to the salmon, if they were going for the 'high quality and low quantity' vibe that's typical of many high-class restaurants, they really needed to work on the presentation, because what is photographed below doesn't scream 'high-class' to me:

OOTD: I knew you were trouble when you walked in

What I wore to dine at one of my favourite Japanese restaurants for the umpteenth time!

Angelica T-shirt: New Look (a store I'm clearly a fan of!)
Earrings: Won in a competition

Hair styling attempts: trying to curl my hair to look like Jessica Chastain's at the Golden Globes.

I loved Jessica Chastain's look at the Golden Globes on Sunday, so I tried to replicate those curls on my own hair. Due to time constraints, I didn't have time to use the hair curler, so just tied my hair up in a tight bun immediately after I washed it, used a hairdryer until it was partially dry, and kept it in the bun until the evening, which is when the photo was taken.

I daresay it looked better on Jess, but hey-ho, it's fun to try new things!

As for the OOTD...

Sweater/shirt combo: Debenham's

Glasses: Red or Dead

Earrings: TK Maxx

Restaurant review: EAT TOKYO (Covent Garden)

Over the past few months, I’ve been to Eat Tokyo twice, and if I’m ever in Covent Garden and struggling to decide on somewhere to eat, this restaurant will be at the forefront of my mind.

Just with Dishoom and On the Bab, it doesn’t take reservations and you have to queue. This suggests the restaurant cares more about profits than comfort of its customers. However, the fact that there are always droves of people queuing outside the Covent Garden branch of Eat Tokyo means that these people deem the food is worth queuing for.

The first time I dined there, I had a salmon teriyaki bento box. There are a variety of bento boxes at Eat Tokyo, ranging from sashimi, chicken katsu and vegetarian. They range in price, but the most expensive bento box is £18. These two are both less than that (~£16 and £8.50, if I remember correctly):

Authentic Japanese food at its best!

Restaurant review: STICKS’N’SUSHI (Covent Garden)

Despite meeting Per Mertesacker at Sushisamba, I’ve never actually dined there, and thus the mantle of fanciest sushi restaurant I’ve been to is Sticks’n’Sushi at Henrietta Street, London.

We had the ‘Gala’, which, at £75, wasn’t cheap. The option included Beef Tataki, Edamame, Hotate Kataifi, Nigiri, Chicken with chili & teriyaki, lamb chop with miso herb butter and duck breast with panko & wasabi Caesar, so there was plenty to fill two people’s boots!

Restaurant review: GILGAMESH (Camden)

Gilgamesh advertises itself as a pan-Asian restaurant, bar and nightclub. I visited it with my brother using a LivingSocial deal that I had bought for £34. The deal entitled us to afternoon tea and free-flowing Prosecco for two hours. I personally tend to find LivingSocial deals more honourable than Groupon ones, and the 'unlimited Prosecco for 2 hours' part of the deal appealed to me.

Restaurant review: KOI SUSHI & NOODLE BAR (Finchley Road)

I went to Koi Sushi & Noodle Bar last year on a Groupon deal, which entitles the bearer to 306pieces of sushi. Truth be told, it wasn't the best deal Groupon have sold me.

The decor in the place is terrible: faded tables that are so rickety, I wouldn't be surprised if they were lifted from a garbage disposal. The toilets smelt extremely bad; one suspects that they're washed once a week, if that. 

The restaurant is short-staffed and the waiters are rude and inattentive. You're supposed to get unlimited green tea with the Groupon offer, but we only got two refills, because each time I raised my hand to try and get the waiters attention, he either pretended not to see me, or told me curtly 'later'.

The food was horrifically basic. As you can see in the photos, the sushi rolls were wrapped in plain rice, and the ingredients used for the meat or vegetables inside it tasted strange, like they were past their sell by date, but the chefs would try and hide it by dousing it in sauce. Maaaaate. Your punters have tastebuds. We won't be fooled that easily. Lastly, the rolls were tiny in size, and 18 measly pieces per person did not suffice for dinner.

Even the attempts to make the food look aesthetically pleasing were half assed: the picture above indicates the chef had tried to dress it up with some sauce, but then decided the punter, who had only come in with a deal they bought on the internet, after all, didn't merit such decoration to their plate.

Verily I say, don't be tricked by the £14.80 Groupon deal. Do you tastebuds a favour and just go buy a large box from Itsu or Wasabi, where the ingredients they use at least aren't bottom of the barrel. Your body will thank you.

Grade: F

Restaurant review: NIZUNI JAPANESE RESTAURANT (Charlotte Street)

Situated on Charlotte Street, a road that is both close to my University and boasting some great restaurants (the previously reviewed BiBimBap being one of them), Nizuni is an elegant, dimly lit Japanese restaurant which serves a range of Japanese dishes, with sushi being its main draw.

We ordered two different sets of sushi, a nizuni set (in honour of the name of the restaurant, I thought it would be rude not to) as well as a 10-piece sushi selection. Both were utterly delicious (great quantities of fish and the sauces were tantilising), but frightfully overpriced. The 22-piece nizuni set came to £39, which averages to almost £2 per individual small piece, which, just by a visual inspection of below, you can see, are accomplishedly cooked and presented, but certainly not the gold that such a price tag would imply.

Although the waiters were extremely helpful and obliging, there was a trainee member of staff working that day who got our orders confused, and thus, delayed us getting dinner. I’ll be generous and not dock the restaurant too many points for that as I could see her intentions were good, but her mind was jumbled. For her sake, I hope her memory has improved since our visit.

The alcohol selection wasn’t as expensive as the food, and we had a whole bottle of Japanese rice win between us and a beer apiece. Both tasted great.

Aside from the marvellous Hi Sushi, I am yet to visit a sushi place in London that offers good value for money. This certainly hasn’t changed having visited Nizuni. That said, the food was certainly high quality, and if you have the time, do check out their website, which is one of the coolest I've seen of a London restaurant so far! (If only they'd saved the money on their web designer and spent it on lowering prices of their food, I would have an even more favourable view of the place).

Grade: B

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your restaurant, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com

Mugen (Monument)

Grade: A-

Restaurant review: CAPE TOWN FISH MARKET (Oxford Circus)

A classy-looking joint, Cape Town Fish Market is particularly popular with tourists who want to give their tootsies a rest from shopping. It even boasts an actual fish tank with exotic fish in their venue. The food isn’t bad either, with the salmon teriyaki I ordered an absolute treat. The sauce accompanying the meal might just be some of the best teriyaki sauce I’ve ever had, so that’s well worth checking out (I suspect some wine may have been added into it to give it an extra kick; whatever it was, it worked!) 

My friend had sea bass, which also tasted wonderful. For starters, I ordered the fish cake, which was pretty decent (made more so by the fabulous sauce accompanying it), as well as a sushi nigiri set, which was relatively paint-by-numbers fare.

Provided you use a Tastecard, the dining at Cape Town Fish Market is relatively affordable, but a word of warning: 1) the restaurant help themselves to a healthy tip, which doesn’t wash with me, because if the service is that terrific, you shouldn’t have to give yourself a tip, if you know your service has merited one from us. 

And 2) those bottles of water on your table that the waiters are all too happy to crack open for you? Yeah, they cost £3.50 each. They’re there to lure you into a false sense of security. And then the waiters are all too happy to bring more to the table, even when you haven’t asked for any more. A real shame, as, had those two things not let the place down, I would be singing Cape Town Fish Market's praises, especially that of its main dishes. 

As such, I left the place feeling a little hard done by.

Grade: B-

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your restaurant, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com

Restaurant reviews: ASSA JAPANESE and ASSA KOREAN (Tottenham Court Road)

Since attending a central London-based university at the beginning of October, I’ve wined and dined at several of the restaurants situated around the Tottenham Court Road/Oxford Street/Goodge Street area. Terrific for my tummy, less so for my poor River Island purse!

I went to the Japanese Assa a month ago, for lunch.

 

Being a sucker for salmon, I opted for the salmon tray, and had Japanese beer. It was a very well-presented dish, and I have absolutely no qualms with the quality of the salmon, which was tip-top. The sushi and dumplings also tasted great. In fact, the ensemble was only really let down by the lump of rice, which was presented unimaginatively, and tasted completely bland. 

There was also not nearly enough. I don’t eat half as much as I do for dinner at lunch, so I shudder to think how starving I’d be had I come here in the evening, but even for a quick lunchbreak between lecturers, even with the extra calories of a beer, I wasn’t near fed enough. 

My friend had a similar-style dish, again, presented stylishly enough, but not enough there. Thus, in terms of efficacy of a restaurant, I’m afraid I have to give Assa Japanese a C-.

The Korean Assa was visited on Monday evening, and I had a much better gastronomical experience, for smaller prices! 

We had a seafood pancake to share for starters (wonderful, and delightfully moreish), and for my main I had spicy chicken stir-fry, which, gracefully, didn’t burn my tongue off, but tasted great. 

The fact that drinks were on the house (cold Korean tea) added to the appeal of visiting this place, and for central London, it was very reasonably priced indeed. I can definitely see myself going back, particularly as it’s so close to my uni. A-

RESTAURANT REVIEW: Yazu Sushi (Mayfair)

Continuing with my penchant for buying food package deals off LivingSocial/Wowcher/Groupon, I forayed back into Wowcher, despite the last deal I got from them being an exercise in false advertising. This time around, the restaurant didn’t so much do differently as it said on the tin, as the reality and the pretty photos placed online being absolutely worlds apart.

Here is what we really had:

And this is how the sushi was presented on the website. Notice all the vibrant, gorgeous colours that were missing from the real photo.

As for the meal itself, the fish, rice and vegetables were all cooked pretty proficiently, despite the ridiculously small portions (look at that prawn! Look at it! Not looking? That's cos there's barely any there). The tinyness of the food did mean that we ate everything in one bite, and didn't get enough time to savour the taste. 

However, I haven’t contracted food poisoning yet, a miracle in itself, given how grotty the surroundings were. Let me paint a picture for you: you know how in Yo Sushi, there’s about 10 conveyer belts, and people sit around one of the 10 conveyor belts? Well, Yazu Sushi had just one of the conveyor belts. That was it.

Add in the fact that the owner of the restaurant was utterly unwelcoming, greeting me with abruptness. His frosty behaviour reached Alan Partridge-levels of comedy when he told me, about three times, that I was occupying too much room around the conveyor belt, and he practically manhandled me into the corner where I was so cramped, it was amazing I could even breathe.

Thus, whilst the food was well-cooked enough, all I can really remember about eating there was the measly portions; inspect the photos for yourself if you don’t believe me. Never in a million years is that enough to feed two people! Factor in that we had a surly host, and frankly, Yazu Sushi is lucky that I’m not giving it an even lower grade.

Grade: D

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your restaurant, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com

Restaurant review: INAMO (Soho)

I had a completely new dining experience on Monday evening in Inamo, a fusion Asian restaurant where the tables have a touchpad on the side, and the table itself serves as a giant screen. From this, you can order food using technology rather than hailing a waiter and omit that awkward small talk. 

In addition to this, you can choose the “ambience” to be projected onto the table, whether it be photos of palm trees or a pattern, as well as play games whilst waiting for your order, be it alone, or with others.

So far, so innovative. Credit to the creators behind this idea, the novelty of it definitely didn’t wear off on me throughout my stay at Inamo, and I would have happily spent even more time exploring all the functions of the interactive table. But my chief reason for attending restaurants has and always will be for the food, and the prices and quantities at this place were nothing short of exorbitant.

For starters, we had three dumplings, which cost £5.75, but they were so small, that you could easily have chomped all three in one bite. Don’t get me wrong, it was wonderfully presented, the sauce was fantastic and the dumpling itself didn’t taste bad either, but nearly six pounds for what was essentially the ingredients of ONE decent sized dumpling, spread out over three, was taking liberties.

The mains weren’t much better. The nigri set was £13.75, and as you can see from the photo, it wasn’t anything more than just eight pieces of sushi. From a supermarket, you could have gotten that for about £4, and even in Wasabi, this would have clocked in less than £7 and tasted just as good. So that was disappointing. 

The Berkshire Pork Neck - the highlight of my dining experience at Inamo -  fulfilled expectations better. Again, quantities weren’t great (the cooks craftily disguised the meat under layers of sauce, giving the appearance of there being more than was actually there), but from the rich taste, you sensed that some thought had actually gone into the inception and preparation of the meal. I don’t usually like pork, but in the blend of spicy chocolate sauce, red wine reduction & crushed wasabi peas sauce that came with it, it tasted wonderful.

The dessert was a strange one. Three different flavours of homemade ice cream was served, to varying degrees of success. They tasted more organic, and thus healthy than that you might get elsewhere, but one of them was far too tangy for my palate, and as such, I couldn’t eat too much of it. The spongy texture also gave me an ill-feeling that it was soap, and not something edible, that I was tucking into.

All this left me unsure of where I stood on Inamo. I did have a great time there, but that was mainly down to the child-like glee the interactrive table bought out in me. The food, however, left a lot to be desired. Only the pork neck actually satiated my appetite; the others, whilst intricately displayed, left me thoroughly disenchanted, not least because there was just so goddamn little of it there. 

Perhaps if they’d spent less time fussing on the tech and took a bit more time thinking about the dishes being offered, I’d actually want to go back there to eat.

Grade: C

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your restaurant, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com

Restaurant review: HI SUSHI (Covent Garden)

As my little adventure three months ago should illustrate, I bloody love sushi. The idea of paying a fixed amount and then stuffing my face is right up my alley, although at Yo Sushi there was a time constraint.

At Hi Sushi, the restraint is that you can eat as much as you want within reason, that is, you get a huge quantity of everything, more than you could want, and are allowed to make "orders" on top of that. This detracts from the buffet-style quality that Yo Sushi had, but on the upside, the quality of the sushi supplied is noticeably better:

It was a while ago that I went, so unfortunately my memory of the actual names of items is a little hazy. However, in the photo above, I loved everything served other than the brown thing on the left.

In terms of the quality/quantity trade-off, I would say that this place has the beating of Yo Sushi. Prices are about similar in the two, but in Yo Sushi they're fairly brazen about the fact that for £19.50, you won't be tasting any of their premium stuff. Pretty much everything I had to eat in Hi Sushi was premium, carefully crafted and satiated by taste buds wonderfully. 

Thus, it is very probable that I'll be saying Hi to Hi Sushi before I re-say Yo to Yo Sushi.

Grade: A

New discovery: Sumo Sundays at Yo Sushi!

Every Sunday, at Yo Sushi!, you can pay £19.50 and eat all you want from the conveyor belts (save the grey or yellow dishes) for an hour. I initially thought that one hour was too short for me to enjoy all the sushi, but it soon turned out to be more than enough, as I was eating at such a rapid rate that I was full after about 45 minutes. The range of food on offer wasn't restrictive at all, I had vegetarian sushi, salmon, regular sushi, calamari, fruit salads, sweet desserts, etc. A few photos:

My final plate tally came to:

All that gluttony came at a cost, however. By the time it came to leave, I could barely move my sorry ass:

Overall, it was a fantastic culinary experience, with you earning back what you pay, several times over. It's particularly good fun if you go with a group of friends - you can see who eats the most! I went with two boys, and out-ate them comfortably. Just braggin ;)

La, love, lick you like vanilla ice.

Photos of nice meals I've had this week! Me and the housemates had a huge Chinese food haul, so the vast majority of pictures this week are from the deliciousness then!

(favourite dish of the week)

Restaurant review: BENIHANA (Piccadilly Circus)

Just off Piccadilly Circus Tube station is Benihana, a trendy Japanese restaurant. Currently undergoing renovations in certain parts of the venue, the drinks/waiting area was mainly cordoned off and in the interim, the waiting area consisted of two little round tables (of which I shared with another lady who was waiting). 

But the actual restaurant itself was a unusual delight. The way it was arranged was that everyone was sat with strangers around a metal grill, and the meal was cooked directly in front of you, but it wasn’t just basic turning the food over; there was a real visual firework to go with the preparation of the food – the chef sprayed some pepper over the vegetables and with a flourish, casually tossed the pepper shaker upwards and caught it in his big chef’s hat. Elsewhere, other chefs threw their vinegar or salt shakers into the air, span on the spot and caught it. For veterans of Japanese restaurants, food was thrown into their mouths for them eat. Fun was very much on the menu here.

I had the set menu, which was £23 and had 8 courses – all quite small, so that you got a taste of everything. Some of the courses were misses (a pot of rice with what seemed like half a bottle of soya sauce tipped on was far too salty to fully consume), but the meat (a choice of two from chicken, salmon, seabass, steak) was cooked to your preference, the sushi was fantastic, and the dessert, a tiny square of chocolate, was exactly what was needed to sweeten up the overall quite a savoury meal. 

Drinks were overpriced, even by London’s standards - £8.50 for a strawberry daiquiri that tasted suspiciously devoid of any alcohol whatsoever, but artfully designed in a way that the presentations of the cocktail was so lovely that you almost didn’t realise you were being conned. However, kudos has to go to the chefs for making mojitos, a drink I’m not usually too fond of – quite delicious with the aid of some lychees.

Overall, as far as overpriced restaurants in the city centre go, Benihana definitely sits up there, with more than enough charm to carry off its inflated menu prices. The entertaining “show” put on by the waiters make it a good venue to pick when out with friends, or children, who will surely love it.

Grade: B+/A-