Of course, being a greedy bugger, I order far more than is normal. But that bill fills me with shame.
Dinings SW3
Walton House, Walton St, Chelsea, London SW3 2JH
Rating:
Dinings, a small, modern Japanese place in Marylebone, is a perennially superlative restaurant. One of my all-time favourites, the sort of place that still gets me giddy with greedy glee. Seriously, I must have been dozens of times over the years and never even had an average bite. Let alone a bad one.
Sure, there’s barely room to swing a mackerel, let alone a full-grown tuna. The upstairs sushi bar is elbow-bashing tiny, the dimly lit basement so cramped that even stretching a leg can result in embarrassingly unplanned footsie with the table next door. Still, even after a decade of business, the place is eternally packed.
And it’s not hard to see why. The menu expertly throws together traditional Japanese cooking with European ingredients (truffle, foie gras, smoked paprika) and Nikkei cuisine (the two chef proprietors trained at Nobu, where this Japanese/ Peruvian fusion found international fame) .
So ‘Tar Tar chips’ fill home-made crisps with minced fatty tuna, wasabi and jalapeño – crunch, chew, grin inanely. And Iberian pork shabu-shabu, sliced tissue-paper thin and lavished with a sweet, tart and spicy chojang sauce.
Wagyu char-siu beef buns, obscenely rich and lasciviously squashy; peerless otoro sashimi; flawless uni sushi; ethereally crisp Santa Barbara shrimp tempura; that yellowtail sashimi with British caviar and jalapeno salsa, every bit the equal of its Nobu progenitor. And… oh hell, I could go on for ever.
Even the sushi rolls, so often the dribbling dullard of the Japanese menu, introduce eel to foie gras with spectacular results. So news that they’ re opening a new branch, in the Chelsea/ Belgravia borderlands is very good news indeed.
The site, on Walton Street, used to be Toto’s, a rather good Italian place, made all the better by the involvement of Silvano Giraldin, the maestro of maitre d’s. Now, though, there’s a smart upstairs sushi bar. And a rather strange downstairs dining room.
In fact, a very strange downstairs dining room. On the one hand, you’ ll find the usual open kitchen, mirrored walls and furiously modern chandelier.
Yet plonked against the back wall is a vast carved wooden ‘heritage’ Victorian fireplace. Downton Abbey meets downtown Tokyo. Most bizarre. Especially when one section of that glass wall conceals a door to a prep kitchen, through which staff constantly disappear and emerge. The room feels cold, unfinished, temporary and oddly unsettling. More upmarket doctor’s surgery than dining room.
You almost expect to find old copies of Country Life. Still, this is Dinings. At least the food will thrill. And there are some pretty good dishes. Expertly cut otoro sashimi, lavishly fatty. Tar chips, filled with smoky, chilli-spiked wagyu.
A lone scallop, plump and virginal, charred by the Josper and wearing a fiery yet diaphanous wasabi slip. Nasu miso transforms the dowdy aubergine into soft, silkenly wanton umami delight.
Cool Cornish oysters, their bracing saline charms cosseted by a gasp of yuzu. And proper sushi rice, blood warm, each grain discernible from the rest, the topping every bit as fine. Service is sweet and charming, yet we spend a long time waiting. In the time it takes to complete dinner, not only could we have grown our own rice, but polished it, fermented the stuff and transformed it into sake.
OK, so the place has only just opened. It’s a little unfair to complain about how long the dishes take to come out. But far less forgivable is the fact that the dishes start to meld into one distinctly average homogenous whole.
‘Pretty vacant,’ says my wife, as another perfectly plated but essentially underwhelming construction appears. ‘And unmemorable.’
An unpleasantly salty agedashi tofu, followed by a deathly dull Iberian pork loin, a dish barely worthy to cower at the feet of the Marylebone shabushabu. Yellowtail with jalapeno mayonnaise is cloyingly rich, as is the toro, covered with the same gloop, while kelp-infused Dover sole sashimi is a bland bore.
We begin to suffer from edible ennui, picking disconsolately at turbot fins with ponzu jelly and asparagus drowning in an unpleasant yuzu hollandaise. And wonder if we’ re getting this all wrong.
All around us, the locals – with their taut skin, luminous teeth, expensively dishevelled T-shirts and watches that cost more than a semi-detached house – are having a ball. And then there are the prices.
The original Dinings is far from cheap – any serious seafood always comes at a price. But our bill, with a bottle of £69 sake (damned good sake) , comes in at a shade under £500. Five. Hundred. Bloody. Quid. For a few good dishes, and a lot more sub-standard ones.
Of course, being a greedy bugger, I order far more than is normal. But that bill fills me with shame. Whereas the original is an inspired life-affirming hug, Dinings SW3 is merely an overpriced shrug. We walk out, past the packed sushi bar, feeling strangely melancholic.
I look at my wife, who just about musters a smile. She grabs my hand and squeezes it. ‘At least we’ ll always have Marylebone,’ she says, with a sigh. I nod, and we totter out into the muggy grasp of the inky Chelsea night.
What Tom ate this week
Tuesday
Launch of London Food Month. Ate rather too many sublime octopus tostadas from Edson Diaz Fuentes. Then on to downstairs at The Ned. Nice gaff. Then the old-school chicken schwarma sandwich from Maroush in Beauchamp Place on way home. The best.
Wednesday
No lunch. Dammit. Not sure why. Takeaway dinner from Chisou Knightsbridge. Otoro, chutoro, cold soba and good sake. Proper Japanese.
Thursday
Lunch at Six Portland Road. Jambon persillé, sauce gribiche, turbot and brown butter, good cheese and lashings of rosé. Damned good.
Friday
Lunch at Barrafina on Adelaide Street, Covent Garden. Lamb’s kidney’s, lettuce with anchovies, chiperones, pig’s ear carpaccio and prawn tortilla.
