Hot plates: Takumi in Soho
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)“Oh, well done me,” I thought last week, proving to be both smug and wrong at the same time, a combination that occurs more often than it really should. I’d been walking to the Coach and Horses — the good one on Greek Street, not the crap one (any of the others) — and spotted a wood-panelled frontage, Japanese script and a name I didn’t recognise. Takumi. Yellow light trickled out of the window and down onto the street, and with that, a sense of promise. I like somewhere inviting, new, unknown.
Except, Takumi isn’t unknown: there’s one in Birmingham. Oops. But seeing as I tend to skip over the bit of the country between Oxford and Edinburgh, I wasn’t to know. Anyway, it was simply a relief to find somewhere recently opened that isn’t shilling a tasting menu. Rarely do I feel the need for a ninth course, unless it comes in a glass with ice.
