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.
Takumi — Google tells me it means something like “artisan” — does that Corbin & King thing, where the choice to be a cheap date or a rich bitch is left to the customer. Two of us made it out for under £135 all in, but cheerfully could have doubled the damage or, with disregard for our wallets, figures and hangovers divided equally, tripled it.
The angle of attack is the thing: this could be a place for sushi, sashimi, omakase, maki and treasured bottles of daiginjo, the top-end sake (yours for £78 and up), and brave types — or, yawn, groups — can do whisky and gin by the bottle. But it wasn’t that sort of Wednesday and besides, we were left entirely to our devices. In most places a welcome arrangement, when there’s a menu that runs to, by my count, 132 courses, a little guidance of where to go is a good thing.
Our noses did the directions; behind the bar, where those expensive bottles were lined up like library books, a chef stood salting meat on a charcoal grill. And so the grill was where we travelled to, ordering first six pieces of foie gras buttered with teriyaki sauce on the sensible grounds that such requests may soon make us outlaws.
Soon after came the curious bits of chicken all prettily plated: rich, meaty hearts; crisp, delicious skin ideal for throwing back like a bar snack; and then the feet. Whether you’re into the feet will depend entirely on how reading that sentence makes you feel — they are after all, well, feety, and with a texture as though those feet were wearing little chicken Wellingtons.
Nearby is Humble Chicken, which opened to considerable fanfare last summer and specialises in this stuff. I preferred it here, probably because not everything hit the same soy-ish note; even great records tarnish when they’re played over and over. Simple lamb chops — granted, not terribly Japanese — were flush with salt, not quite Guinea Grill good but not too far off. An error was made with the order of nasu den, aubergine drenched in miso. One might be enough for the stomach, but the tongue will want about six.
We ate garlic like popcorn, felt healthy with blackened okra, and built mountains on the plates out of a bowl of smoked eel rice topped with an egg. Curiously, its yolk began to remind me of Garfield’s stomach. At about this point I wondered if I really should have gone to the Coach beforehand after all, but then I realised I’d found a new Soho favourite, a chameleon both refined but relaxed, where the food is good and the bill isn’t bad. It’s rarer than you might think. Sometimes I’m asked where’s good to go; this place is.
Another place that is sits two streets away, although it is somewhere I’ve not always warmed to. Wrong again, Ellis. Last week, Victor Garvey’s Sola on Dean Street served me a lunch with just one descriptor: flawless. Now there’s a tasting menu I can support. If you are in the market for Michelin — and this week is, after all, the one to be — then I can think of almost nowhere cooking at a higher level. Flawless. I never use that word.
