Sake no Hana - the new Nobu

Sake no hana in a nutshell

• Food: Modern Japanese. Exquisite sashimi and intriguing home-style dishes. You’ll need help deciphering the menu though.
• Wine: Sake, you mean. A massive and massively expensive list though there are a few reasonably priced options. Give the champagne a miss though at these prices
• Style/Decor: Stunning once you get through the wildly kitsch black and gold entrance
• Service: Excellent. Friendly and efficient
• Who to go with: A celebrity, preferably. Maybe Richard Gere . . .
• Who not to go with: Someone who’s never had a Japanese meal before
• Verdict: Potentially the new Nobu but will the food be too far out for its see-and-be-seen clientele?
• Cost: -

There’s a lot to say about Sake no Hana that isn’t to do with the food. The fact that it’s the latest opening from one of London’s most brilliantly innovative restaurateurs, Alan Yau - the creator of Wagamama, Hakkasan and Yauatcha - for a start. The hard-to-remember name which means sake of flowers. (The trick is to remember the sake bit and the rest falls into place) The rumour that the place is funded by a Russian billionaire but then isn’t everything these days? And the decor. Aaaaaargh, the decor!

Actually it’s really only the entrance that is a bit of a shock. When you walk through the door you’re greated by two long gold and black escalators that looked if they’ve come straight from a 1960s Bond movie. It’s possible they have. The restaurant used to be run by Geoffrey Moore, son of former 007 Roger Moore. Maybe they sold them to him as a job lot.

Anyway once you get to the top all is calm and beige with an intricate network of blond wood poles floating overhead and elegant timber-lined walls. (The restaurant has been designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma). There are two types of tables - Japanese-style ones where you sit on tatami mats and remove your shoes and western ones where you sit on chairs.

Actually there are two types of dining room, the posh area and a rather cramped extension of the dining room at the side which looks a bit like a bar or a waiting area, certainly not somewhere you’d expect to consume what is potentially an eye-wateringly expensive meal

The menu, we discover, is divided into styles of dishes such as tsuki dashi, tsukuri, yakimono, agemono, none of them familiar. So what to order? There isn’t really any guidance so we consult our waiter who suggests we try a bit of everything. Eyeing the prices nervously (the wagyu beef is £75) we decide to set him a price limit of £50 a head and let him make suggestions. As he talks us through each section the whole process takes about 10 minutes during which we down two very good cocktails including one that includes sake and poire William (Yau’s cocktails have always been first rate)

Four dishes in we discover we’ve ordered way too much. Confusingly some dishes are for one, others for four which does make the beef seem more reasonable. Highlights were the following:

• nasu iridashi a umami-rich dish of warm aubergine with a velvety sesame dressing scattered with bonito flakes. Probably the best aubergine you’ll ever have eaten

• kani no ume shu jelly a delicate sweet and sour dish of crab in plum jelly studded with huge red salmon roe eggs

• the sashimi (described on the menu as tsukuri) a surprisingly generous-sized helping of fabulously fresh, beautifully cut otoro (fatty tuna) and hamachi (yellowtail)

• the Chilean seabass in houba leaf with miso, gingko nut and shimeji mushrooms (a bit like Nobu’s black cod but lighter)

• the unagi no hitsumabushi (eel rice) from the shokuji menu, a real comfort food dish of intensely savoury eel mashed before us at table into sticky rice. Enough for four and way too much for us by this stage of the meal.

Mixed tempura and futomaki sushi (the latter again enough for four) were faultless but didn’t have quite the wow factor of the rest of the meal. There was only one disappointment - a braised dish of two rather soggy ‘purses’ filled with tofu and vegetables that I think was the chakin ni. Our fault because we’d disregarded the waiter’s suggestion of Poulet Noir Ni that I suspect would have been more to western tastes as too expensive. But it probably served 3 or 4.

We chickened out on the desserts which were urged on us by the staff with genuine enthusiasm. Our refusal seemed a particular disappointment to the sommelier Stuart - an improbable figure in these elegant oriental surroundings being large, cheerful and Australian - who wanted to show off a pairing he’d come up with of a rich oak aged sake called Hano Hato Junmai Kijoshu with a chocolate torte. He served the sake anyway which was quite remarkable - just like an oloroso sherry. (You can take a sake flight throughout the meal, matched to the dishes you order for 65)

If we go again, and it may be hard to get in once the fashionistas descend as they undoubtedly will, we would order more modestly: a salad, sashimi, the seabass and maybe the eel rice would make a great - and not too expensive - meal.

What Yau has managed to pull off yet again is to make an unfamiliar cuisine an accessible, relaxed and stylish experience. Sake no Hana looks like being the new Nobu.

Sake no Hana is at 23 St James's Street, London SW1A 1HA. Tel: 020 7925 8988
Email: mail@sakenohana.com