Koyn, London: ‘I blame Bobby De Niro’ – restaurant review

I think I hate Robert De Niro. I mean, I’m sure he’s a nice bloke and the films are good, although The Irishman was 209 minutes better spent painting your house. But I blame him personally for the Great Schism in Japanese restaurants.

In 1988, when De Niro first met Nobu Matsuhisa, LA was home to the largest concentration of people of Japanese descent in the US. Excited by this thrilling West Coast cuisine, De Niro persuaded the chef to join him in opening Nobu in the rapidly gentrifying TriBeCa district of Manhattan. Nobu’s cooking was already a fusion — he’d worked in Peru and was introducing South American influences — but De Niro made it the globally fashionable face of Japanese cuisine.

It made sense. Japanese food was “exotic”. It had a powerful aesthetic that fitted with a hip Hollywood perception of Zen. It had a simplicity that the jet set could appreciate. Like the “International French” that it supplanted, it was easy to like, had gratifyingly arcane codes and some of the most reassuringly recherché ingredients in the world.

In the era now referred to as AD (After De Niro), there emerged a strong strand of what you might call “International Hotel Japanese” in places like Manhattan, LA, Vegas and, inevitably, London’s Mayfair. Koyn, a Japanese restaurant from the LSL group, is one example. An exquisite room in a building that was once part of the American Embassy, there are mysterious discrete spaces, acres of smoky mirror and unimaginably costly surfaces.

Crispy squid came in a large mound, well spiced and with yuzu koshu aioli for dipping. Extremely tasty, but in a quantity that felt disproportionate, almost clumsy. Chutoro, the fatty belly meat of the tuna, was served fanned beautifully on a plate and coated with sudachi soy and kizami wasabi dressing. A glorious principal ingredient, a bit clobbered, if I’m honest, by a sweet/hot/citrus combination it could have stood proudly without.

The spicy tuna tartare is a signature of the restaurant, flavoured with sesame soy, jalapeño and red onion, neatly mounded on to fried rice cakes. An interesting presentation, but serving them six at a time, lined up on a long plate, meant they looked more like a western “sharing plate” than a choreographed part of a Japanese menu.

The “Midori” selection of six vegetables tempura’d crisp and served with the usual ten dashi was an easy win. The seafood hotpot came served in a very authentic ceramic nabe. The lid was lifted at the table to release the amazing smells. The selection of lightly steamed fish, shellfish and crustacean was much like an extremely well-populated bouillabaisse, but problematically the “lobster and sake broth” also tasted like a thick French soup. Delicious, strongly flavoured and crowd-pleasingly “western”.

Unakyu is a roll-type sushi combining grilled freshwater eel, unagi, with Japanese cucumber. It’s usually made with a careful eye to balance, the better to showcase the extremely delicate sweetness of the eel. Here it was made with sweetened soy. Delicious, but somehow a little over creamy, a little oversweet. Oddly, it had the comforting texture of the “tuna mayo” sushi you might get off a conveyor belt. A spicy salmon sushi roll was served with chilli aioli, another weird east/west hybrid that, though undeniably tasty, seemed heavy-handed. Alongside came koji miso soup, properly served in a small dish but immensely strong. Salty and pumped to astonishing extremes by the koji, it was not an appetiser or palate setter, more like the umami grenade one might get around course four of a 14-course western tasting menu.

Look. I’ll be totally honest. I think I might be the problem here, not Koyn. Like a lot of food lovers I didn’t get to go to Nobu much, nor any of the hundreds of high-end places it spawned. My interest in Japanese food really kicked off when we discovered that the sushi/sashimi that had been picked up and run with globally were just one part of the picture. There was another world, everything from the simple comforts of street food ramen and the non-traditional iconoclasm of the udon shop to the simple soul food of the nabe pot and the everyday individual creativity of the izakaya. Japanese food wasn’t just about the sushi masters and thousand dollar omakase, it was also broad and unexpectedly democratic.

Interesting, then, to consider that Koyn is part of a Mayfair restaurant group. It has a French sister in Socca, a Chinese one in Mimi Mei Fair, “fine Indian” ones in Jamavar and Bombay Bustle. I think my difficulty here is that marketing of the restaurants as an entity means that, as I’m eating, I am forced to the question that would be far better left unasked: “Just how Japanese is this place?” and the answer, unfortunately, is “not very”. Expensive prestige ingredients, plenty of high-end chef skills, full of big flavours and show. Good food, but not so much of the gentle, subtle craftsmanship and humility. I have no objection to Japanese food being repackaged for a western audience, but, for me at least, Japanese food has become a pursuit of “soul”. If I’m brutal, this is precisely the magic ingredient that Koyn lacks.

Given my unreasonable animus towards De Niro, I’m afraid Koyn is not to my personal taste. It might be to yours. It is a beautiful room in a fashionable part of town with good, interesting food, but it’s also part of a trend toward high-end, culturally deracinated destinations. Places which, apart from the bank balance of their customer base, are indistinguishable in spirit from any “theme” restaurant.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward, on Instagram @timhayward and email him at [email protected]

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