Jugemu, Soho: ‘The best Japanese food in London’ — restaurant review

Jugemu is a tiny Japanese 20-seater on Winnett Street in Soho. I’ve wanted to go for ages, but I’ve been thwarted every time. It’s difficult to book and the one time I turned up on the off-chance, the place was inevitably closed, a note in Japanese stuck in the window.

It is a sort of legend — the most Japanese place in London, making few compromises. Reports vary wildly. Then I got invited by a chef friend who speaks the language. We disagree about tasting menus, and he wanted to show me Jugemu to help me change my mind.

It’s quite the best room imaginable to eat in. Curtains shut Soho out and, from the second you sit at the bar, your entire attention for the evening is focused on the square foot of bench in front of you. There is no mucking about here, and we dived straight in with small bowls of mozuku, edible algae from Okinawa. It comes cold and, lacking a Japanese adjective, I’d have to say “slimy”. It’s served with a little okra for emphasis and a slice of chilli to set off the very subtle flavour. It’s difficult to describe in an appetising way, but it’s amazing. Light, vegetal, without the salt or iodine elements of stronger seaweeds and a perfectly appropriate starting point.

I suspect chef Yuya Kikuchi’s strategy here is to set out expectations early, because the next dish is a bowl of cold, finely shredded jellyfish. A combination of crunchy and gelatinous which, honestly, is as odd as it sounds. It’s also exciting.

The point of early courses is to wake up the palate, and this one challenges with something uncomfortable from which you need to work to parse the evanescent gorgeousness. We move to slices of octopus tentacle, painted with a slightly sweetened soy glaze and spotted with wasabi. This should be read as a kind of warning that you’re not in the sort of sushi joint where they pass off green horseradish as the real McCoy. A microdot livens and clears the palate and directs your attention towards the slight crunch of tentacle and the balance of the glaze. Alongside it, they serve a chawanmushi, a light-set savoury custard which often contains seafood but has been prepared here with a fragrant dashi and something spectacularly like bacon. If you’re feeling unmoored with all these new sensations, it’s anchoring to eat something that’s got hints of a fried-breakfast-flavoured Angel Delight.

Palates thoroughly worked out, we move on to the sushi phase with a simple sea bream nigiri and then a really quite astonishing piece, made from a lean cut of akami (the red meat of the bluefin tuna) with dried seaweed and tonburi, a soaked seed with a texture a little like caviar. What I can’t explain is how the fish — when correctly presented directly on to the tongue by inserting “upside down” — effectively dissolves in the mouth. I’m searching Wikipedia right now for a cosmological term that will express the difference between this single, hand-formed piece and the bit of robot-made Fish-n-Rice I just had for lunch. I’m failing.

Following a kind of textural arc, there followed a nigiri of medium fatty salmon belly. Clean and clear and leaving enough gustatory headspace to appreciate that the rice is the most important thing going on here. You’re offered no wasabi, no soy. Everything leaves the chef’s fingers precisely as he wants it to hit your tongue, and he has the precision of a sniper.

There are expensive sushi restaurants in London, where the omakase menu follows a prescribed structure. But it’s important to understand that Kikuchi doesn’t operate that way. This is a very idiosyncratic expression, made up of things he likes to cook and eat. When the next dish turns out to be a small bowl of ramen, purists might run screaming from the bar. In fact, it’s beautifully judged. About half-scale and with an extra-intense broth, it has more of the gutsy balance of pasta and ragu than the usual clear soup and noodles.

We might as well admit straight up that shirako is cod semen. What is perhaps surprising is how good it tastes deep fried in tempura batter. A custardy texture that’s a callback to the chawanmushi earlier in the routine and with a lovely, subtle fishiness. To complete the piscine gametes section, this is accompanied by salmon eggs, somehow smaller and more intense than I’m used to.

We rounded off with a non-pasteurised sake called Nabeshima, a gift from the chef that was almost scented, along with shime saba, a pickled mackerel pocket with ginger, a fresh raw scallop with salted yuzu peel and unadorned uni, the glorious gonads of sea urchins.

There’s no question in my mind that this is the best Japanese food I’ve eaten in London. Kikuchi’s attention to his ingredients, both imported and indigenous, is quite staggering and his craft skills in delivering them are second-to-none. But what’s most important to me is the personality of the whole set-up. The transmission of love-through-food that’s the fundamental motor of hospitality.

Did such a glorious evening change my opinion on tasting menus? I’m afraid it rather reinforced it. I’ve heard many chefs link the modern tasting menu to the Japanese omakase — multi-course, zero-choice, set-price — but for me there’s no connection. Kikuchi’s work is a nimble, playful expression of pure soul in food. My issue with the structure of “fine” tasting menus, the rituals, the performance, the rigmarole and the conventions, is that it makes such expressions all but impossible. There are certainly western chefs with the talents to create this level of food, but until they come out of the kitchen and stand behind a bar they will struggle to achieve the essential intimacy.