Off to Canterbury for a shufti around the cathedral, a meander through its pretty streets and a spot of lunch at Sekkoya, a vast, gorgeous-looking new pan-Asian restaurant on the Riverside next to a Curzon cinema, a crazy golf venue and a branch of Heavenly Desserts. The restaurant’s sleek website offers all sorts of bold statements about this hot dining experience (regular readers will be aware that I delight in this kind of Vogon poetry), claiming that it will take us on a “gastronomic journey throughout Asia that transcends ordinary flavours”, and offering cocktails that will “awaken your senses”.
The website emotes grandly in this way for many more yards, so much so, in fact, that I suspect AI. Only a non-sentient being could describe Canterbury’s Riverside as a “vibrant new lifestyle district”, when it’s just an elevated patch of concrete. Maybe Sekkoya is entitled to be cocky, though, because it’s clearly the classiest venue for miles: the place is bedecked in sea-green velour, with shiny floors, pale tan leather seats and an impressive “mural” skylight that gives the impression that you’re dining in a rainforest. Fans of the opulent Chinese restaurant chain Tattu, which is especially big in Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, will recognise dashes of the modern, high-octane glamour that delights Instagram feeds. Add beautiful bathrooms, Kool & The Gang and George Benson on the stereo, and lovely, chipper serving staff, and they clearly mean business here.
Yet, as soon as our first plate arrived – a beautiful-looking Thai salad that on the very first forkful revealed itself to be a big mound of wildly under-dressed cabbage – alarm bells started to ring. If only the food offering were as ballsy as the decor. The “small plates” section of the menu lists chicken wings, edamame, iceberg lettuce salad and prawn or vegetable tempura, which makes a trip to Wagamama seem like a street-food jaunt with Anthony Bourdain. This menu seems to assume that its customers have only ever experienced “abroad” on Google Street View. The small plates menu also features a robata selection of chicken satay, grilled padrón peppers or lamb in ginger and black bean sauce.
The menu then moves to steamed gyoza – I had the vegetable ones, which came swimming in soy and a black, sticky snot that was apparently truffle. Actually, truffle does a lot of heavy lifting on Sekoyya’s menu – it’s there in the miso truffle tagliatelle and on the truffle and parmesan fries, too. There are also Korean bao buns with miso crispy aubergine, hoisin chicken, peppered beef or grilled duck. They jammed my aubergine bao into a toast rack inside a bamboo basket, but the bun was of such poor quality that it couldn’t be extracted without disintegrating, by which time all the tempura batter had fallen off the aubergine and I began to suspect we were being filmed by TikTok pranksters.
Sekkoya is a prime example of why the term “pan-Asian” fills me with such foreboding these days. In its original sense, the phrase meant a culinary extravaganza in which the chefs showed off their discoveries from the 23 provinces of China, with a few highlights from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia thrown in. It was an umbrella term for big, delicious, spicy, sticky and umami. Sekkoya, however, serves large plates of chicken udon, pork ribs in “Japanese-style bbq sauce” and truffle soy rib eye, and makes you think that someone here is deliberately diluting pan-Asian hits and serving them in their safest possible form. It’s the sort of Asian food that was invented for British people and that you’d get at a Cantonese restaurant in Braintree in 1994.
I had hoped that my main course of masala cod would be the moment things turned around, but its green marinade tasted of precisely nothing: no garlic, no ginger, no chilli, no coriander – nothing. I sought refuge in the pickles that came with it, and relished every second of their mild, vinegary zing. I’d decided against eating this with chips, so went for one of the only other suitable side options, steamed rice, which was totally unseasoned, but there was a lot of it and it did come in a lovely bowl.
“Is it worth looking at the dessert menu?” I asked our server. “Oh yes, it’s very exciting,” came the reply, with what I couldn’t be sure was a straight face. It featured ice-cream and sorbet, yuzu cheesecake, chocolate brownie and those bought-in mochi rice-cake ice-cream balls that pan-Asian restaurants often serve as their only dessert to bore you into leaving early because they want to turn your table. Ha! They wouldn’t shake me off that easily here, and my mango mochi ice-cream ball was the loveliest thing I ate that day; Sekkoya serves them with vanilla ice-cream. Gosh, this is some menu writing, but Sekkoya is sort-of-Asian, and the food’s definitely cooked in a pan, so, technically, they’re not lying.
Sekkoya The Riverside, Kingsmead Road, Canterbury, Kent, 01227 286221. Open all week, Sun-Thurs noon-11pm, Fri & Sat noon-1.30am, Sun noon-11pm. From about £35 a head à la carte; Mon-Sat set lunch £15 for two courses, £19 for three, all plus drinks and service
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• This article was amended on 26 April 2024 because an earlier version mistakenly referred to an Everyman Cinema; this has been corrected to a Curzon cinema.
