ALEX GREEN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
For several hours after I left Eel Sushi, I was dreaming lasciviously of its fatty tuna. Was it because it was delicious? Or was it because somehow, despite spending £240 on lunch for three, I was still starving? The answer to both of these questions is yes.
Chris D’Sylva, Eel’s owner, is what we might call a “big character”. He made headlines recently for revealing that at his mega-expensive Notting Hill bistro Dorian, diners are marked on “how much we like the customer and the value of the customer, or the destructiveness of the customer”. Dorian, for its part, is often marked down for being cramped, hurrying tables out in 90 minutes and charging £18 for a single bite of food.
Still, it’s good food. So when D’Sylva announced he was opening a sushi place, I knew, as a raw fish superfan, I would have to go. Then, yer man informed the website Hot Dinners that Eel would contain “no omakase horseshit and ponce”. Omakase is, of course, a system dating back to the Japanese Edo period whereby the chef decides what he’s going to serve you.
Up yours, 400 years of culinary history and all the trainee Japanese chefs only permitted to touch their first grain of rice after a year of study. Let the big boys from Notting Hill show you how it’s done.
D’Sylva also told Hot Dinners that he would be transferring the wine list from Dorian over to Eel Sushi, “instantly making it the best wine list of any sushi bar in the world”. This wound me up no end, which I suspect was the goal. D’Sylva seems to thrive on winding everyone up.
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Still, I’ll rise to it. Wine lists don’t exist in a vacuum. Why on earth should a list designed for European food pair well with sushi? And wouldn’t one of the 160 Michelin-star restaurants in Tokyo have something to say about this? Give me a glass of saké and shove it.
Inside Eel Sushi
KATE SHANASY
So I arrived at Eel cruising for a fight, while also expecting to eat like a king. Nothing works up an appetite like righteous fury. The restaurant looks like a small sauna: counter seating, barely 20 covers all in. As at Dorian, they want you out quickly. You pay your deposit — ten quid a head — and get an hour to shovel in as much fish as you can afford.
And wow, what fish; the quality is extraordinary. You can order single nigiri for £4 to £29, but we go for the “nigiri flight” for £60 and let the chef choose (a bit like you might, say, in a horseshit omakase restaurant).
We eat bream, yellowtail, salmon. Then eel, delicately scorched to make the soy sauce glaze crackly and sweet. The one chardonnay offered by the glass, for all my carping, pairs perfectly. These guys do know what they’re doing.
We take some sashimi too — that remarkable chutoro (fatty tuna) and decent red snapper. The only weak link is the miso soup: anaemic, with none of the salty, misty warmth that seeps into your bloodstream.
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Exactly 54 minutes into our allocated hour, the waitress appears and drops a bill in front of me. “I don’t want to, but I have to,” she says. The card machine follows with indecent haste.
We booked for four but are a man down due to a delayed train, so we should lose a tenner off our deposit. The waitress kindly waives this, she says, “because I’m in a good Sunday mood”. Written down, this sounds like a cheery bit of beneficence. In fact, it felt like a bollocking from a terrifying matron. “Don’t you try that nonsense here again!”
Chutoro and red snapper sashimi
You shouldn’t be able to book for four here. It’s counter seating, and you wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation. The problem with D’Sylva is he seems happy to offer a bad experience. This is also why Dorian packs its tables, so you end up eating dinner with two thirds of a random stranger’s back as your date.
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Yet a big omakase isn’t always practical, and this is clearly the highest-quality sushi in London outside the horseshit peddlers’ places. It’s good for a quick lunch if you are the type of person who spends £80 on sushi the way I spend £9 at Gail’s. But it could be more if D’Sylva showed more care for his customers.
Two hours after lunch, my guests went to Five Guys and got a burger to fill them up.
★★★✩✩
118 Talbot Road, London W11 1JR; eelsushi.com
Dining and Cooking