Sake No Hana
I’m working through the backlog of reviews, eat seems with all the eating out lately there has been no time to actually type up the notes on them. This is one I’ve desperately wanted to get published for a while, in part because I’d been looking forward to going for such a long time.
Japanese cuisine is one of the things I miss most about Australia. A large number of immigrants from south and east Asia, combined with ready access to high quality seafood means that even your strip mall hand-roll vendors are of a higher calibre than much of the sushi we’ve eaten in restaurants throughout the UK. So despite my longing for quality sushi we’ve been burned so many times that I’m reluctant to try anywhere that isn’t almost unanimously regarded as being excellent. When the most consistent complaint about Sake No Hana is the price and TopTable were offering a 40% offer it would have been remiss not to jump at it.
The good news is it really was the best Japanese we’ve had in the UK. Emma ordered the sashimi platter along with and extra serve of the fatty tuna sashimi while I opted for a selection of sushi. The fatty tuna sashimi was the highlight for me; it had a rich tuna flavour that melted away in the mouth with a sweetness not unlike the effect you get from a good iberico jamon. The salmon was also excellent and anywhere else it probably would have been the star. Meanwhile on the sushi plate I’d ordered tuna, salmon, seabass, eel, and king crab. I’d probably not order the tuna again, I’d get some sashimi instead.
Emma (un)fortunately wasn’t very hungry and nothing else on the menu piqued her interest to enough to order while I ordered a seasonal mixed tempura for us to share and a red miso soup. The batter was light and crisp as you’d expect, and the vegetables fresh and still with some bite too them. We both spent a few minutes contemplating whether we should order another round of sashimi, it was after all excellent and neither of us had eaten terribly much and could comfortably fit more in. In the end we opted for the traditional Japanese approach of stopping before you are actually full and asked for the bill. Even after the 40% discount it came to just over £100 for food alone.
I suspect that we’ll be back at some point when the longing for good sashimi becomes too much as we were both very impressed with the quality of the food. It’s just disappointing that to get such quality in London it seems like we’re forced to spend 4x more than we would in Melbourne or Vancouver.
