YASHIN OCEAN HOUSE, SOUTH KENSINGTON

Earlier this week I wrote about my favourite Chinese meal in London. And today's post is about my favourite Japanese restaurant in London - Yashin Ocean House. This post was meant to go live while I was actually in Japan last week, but due to a massively heavy schedule out there I didn't get any time to write or work, as I'd thought I would (not a bad thing - just means I'm a bit behind on posting!)
 

I've been to Yashin Ocean House before, once for food and once for drinks before a friend's wedding at the Armenian church round the corner... Yashin is a beautiful restaurant on Old Brompton Road, with a huge oval bar in the middle of the room, and tables dotted round one end of it. They also have a little terrace with outside seats for the warmer months. Yashin merges traditional Japanese techniques with more contemporary cooking ideas and their dishes are absolutely spectacular. I was invited down to sample some of their delights, and headed there just before going to Japan. I wanted to go before Japan so I could see how their food compared to "the real thing". There were lots of parts of the menu that were very similar to the food I ate in Japan and Yashin have the same emphasis on nose to tail cooking as they do in Japan. I love this attitude towards food and wish it was more prevalent in restaurants in London as it's so important to use as much as the fish or animal as possible.

 

A lot of the dishes at Yashin are real wow dishes, and one of the first of those we tried was the sashimi island without soy sauce. The plate of sashimi arrives at the table smoking with dry ice and each of the six types of raw fish is served with a non-soy based jelly or sauce to compliment it - fatty tuna with truffle infused ponzu jelly, prawn with coriander sauce, salmon with tosazu (Japanese vinegar) jelly, yellowtail with kizami wasabi, sea bream with a sweet sauce and rice crackers, and mackerel with grated ginger and chopped chives. I'm a sashimi fan anyway and this platter was my idea of heaven. Each fish and sauce had such a distinct flavour, and I didn't even miss the soy sauce. In Japan they rarely serve soy sauce with sashimi, and I did start to miss it a little there, but it really makes you appreciate the other flavours without having a pot of the salty sauce to dunk your fish in! Thinking about the meal at Yashin now, having been to Japan since, I'm surprised they serve mackerel sashimi. It's one of my favourite fish to eat raw, but I learnt in Tokyo that they never serve raw mackerel in Japan so it's interesting that it's on the menu at such a traditional Japanese restaurant here.

The next dish to wow us was the Paradise Prawn - a whole king prawn tempura-ed, which you eat all of. It arrived at the table on a wire so looks like it's suspended in mid air. An added bit of drama happened when the waiter put the prawn-on-a-wire down on our table and the whole thing's head fell off!! Not quite what was meant to happen but it made me laugh! The prawn itself (which they replaced with an un beheaded one) was delicious. Crunchy tempura encasing juicy flesh and an extra crunch from the shell.

My favourite hot dish at Yashin was the cod cheeks with chilli amazu (a Japanese sweet and sour sauce made with rice wine vinegar). Lightly seared cod cheeks in the lightest of broths that was sweet and tangy, with a slight kick to it. It was such a delicate dish yet full of flavour.  

Sushi wise we had sukiyaki (a way of cooking meat in a stew, almost like a fondue) beef with red ginger and an egg yolk sauce. I don't think I've had meat sushi rolls before and they were good, but I think there's a reason they're normally made with fish and not meat as the natural oils of the fish lend themselves to being wrapped in seaweed and rice better than meat does. I liked the innovative "make your own" sauce with the egg yolk though and this added a lot of flavour and moisture to the rolls.
 

Our ngiri dish of four pieces of fish on top of sushi rice was excellent. As with the sashimi plate, each piece of fish had a complimenting sauce on top of it, and I particularly loved the tuna and wasabi, though each piece was superb and unique in its flavour.

 

The strangest dish we had was the miso cappuccino - miso soup with seaweed topped with tofu espuma, served in a vintage china teacup! It was good, though I'm not the biggest tofu fan and there's quite a lot of it as foam before you get to the miso.

 

 

Yashin Ocean House really does do Japanese food like no other restaurant I know in London. It's fun, modern and everything is done to such a high quality. It's not cheap, but I don't think you pay more than what it's worth and some dishes are excellent value - the sashimi island is £16 per person, which is really good value for what you get. If your budget is tight you can share and sample a few dishes, but it's also the perfect spot for a big, fancy meal with a group of mates. Full info on the restaurant and booking details can be found here.