An ‘interesting’ evening spent at 6 seater omakase counter Juno, located in a back room of the very busy Los Mochis Mexican/Japanese fusion bar restaurant in Notting Hill. Once you’ve fought your way through the throngs of pissed up Notting-bots throwing tuna tataki tacos into their faces, washed down with a few saki-ritas, you enter a tiny back room of nirvana levels of zen calm compared to what you’ve just experienced. All is well with the world once again.
Enough snidery from me. I respect what exec chef (I think he is simultaneously overseeing the opening of a behemoth restaurant near Liverpool Street) Leonard Tanyag is trying to do. But it is stomach churning to watch a clearly very talented chef trying to explain to five of the Chelsea set that it’s best to eat the nigiri as one piece rather than munching it in half and placing the uneaten half back on the serving plate. Four of my five communal dining companions near fainted when presented with sea urchin and other dishes seasoned with powdered ants.
This seems an extreme example of what I have encountered at a few top tier counters in London. The Araki, Roketsu and Endo are all serious places but when I have been they all struggle with trying to educate a lot of the diners on general etiquette or just the basics of how to eat sushi. It must be incredibly frustrating for the chefs.
I’m not sure what the solution is other than either make your counter so incredibly difficult to find or book like Sushi Tetsu or just to jack your prices up to the point that you are the most expensive restaurant in the UK so as to ward off the novices (Sushi Kanesaka £420 before you’ve even had a sip of water or thought about the tip).
Having said all that, Juno isn’t great (if you’ve been to Japan), there is a lot of gimmickry and I doubt you’d ever see anyone in Tokyo mercilessly attacking their nigiri with a blow torch, but it is certainly ok. So Tanyag San is stuck in this purgatory between customers that come to dine and really don’t appreciate what he tries to do and are disgusted by some of it and his dream knowledgable customers who wouldn’t be seen dead here. Tough gig.
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