Umu14-16 Bruton Place,
London W1 (020-7499 8881)"Hello? Anyone in there? Is this the new Japanese restaurant called Umu? If it is, then I have a reservation for 8.30, table for two? Hello? Is there a special password?"
Then a kindly bystander who is outside the restaurant, having previously cracked how to get inside it, explains that if you insert your hand into this shiny metal box embedded in the wall beside the tall wooden slab that's facing you then - tarantara! - the wooden slab slides back to reveal the restaurant behind. It's like putting your hand inside one of those high-tech handbasins, only no water showers your palm; not that a cascade of water would be any more alarming than having to enter a restaurant this way. It's a little secret ceremony that makes you feel a bit special; providing you're using the word "special" in its sense of "stupid".
But maybe Umu's owners sense that a Japanese restaurant in Mayfair doesn't have the same allure as a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo's Ginza district. Maybe this entry ceremony is merely their way of confecting that feeling of pleasant bewilderment that many foreigners (not Bill Murray, obviously) feel when they experience Japan for the first time.
After this introduction to Umu you half expect the inside to be a jewel-flecked Aladdin's cave, staffed by Levantine-looking men in shimmering cloaks and golden turbans and velvet winklepinker sandals. But they're actually all French. This is what fancy foreign restaurants do nowadays. The food might be Indian, or Japanese, but the staff, from the maître d' down, is French. The few Indian or Japanese natives are confined to the kitchen. This means that it's left to various enthusiastic Frenchmen to explain to diners the principle of Japanese kaiseki cuisine, Umu's speciality. They don't do a bad job of it, given the complexity of Japanese ingredients in general, and of kaiseki in particular, but it still feels odd. Imagine going into Rules in Covent Garden and having a cheery Tongan explaining to you the etiquette of shooting and eating grouse, with a little history, a few anecdotes. Would that feel right?
And there is much explaining to do at Umu. The house speciality of Kyoto-style kaiseki meals comes at various price ranges. Alpine ranges, since you ask. The prices at Umu scale such peaks that they make those at other swanky London restaurants look like troughs by comparison. You can get altitude sickness just reading the prices. Umu's recommendation was to order one of the chef's kaiseki tasting menus. These range from £70 a head for the most basic version, through a mid-range £120, rising to £200 a head for a meal in which the chef really flexes his muscles and his larder (£240 if you want the courses to be matched with wine and sake).
A French footballer was eating at the neighbouring table. Now, if you're a French soccer international on maybe £50,000 a week, then there is nothing to scare you about Umu's prices. Umu attracts that kind of crowd. But for most people, the final bill will hover over the meal like a black cloud on the horizon when you're having a picnic. You're never fully relaxed.
Of course, you could take control and order à la carte, as your mood takes you. But the essence of kaiseki is an exquisite, harmonious balance of flavours and textures, orchestrated by the chef to tease and pamper your palate. A succession of tiny, almost mouthful-size dishes, each as ornately crafted as a Fabergé egg, are presented to you by kimono-wrapped waitresses.
It's the gastronomic equivalent of having an orgy with, say, Nicole Kidman, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron, Christy Turlington and Isabelle Adjani, but all in miniature versions of themselves, so that you could manage to enjoy them each in turn without feeling hopelessly spent by breakfast time. At Umu you can't help feeling that if you adventurously ordered your own permutation of the various courses you might make the kind of faux pas that would have the kitchen staff peeking out of the kitchen to see if you were really going to eat the Japanese equivalent of venison and summer pudding in the same mouthful; or if you were going to drink that green liquid, which might actually have been provided just for rinsing your chopsticks between the tsukuri course and the agemono dish. It's possible that the kitchen staff might even video you doing it, so that they could then send the tape to a Tokyo hidden-camera TV show which would replay the scene for the endless amusement of Japanese TV viewers.
We settled for the cheapest set course. One classic kaiseki and one classic sushi kaiseki. The wine list is extensive and expensive. Service is attentive. At times, too attentive. Take a sip of water, and a waiter is there, topping up your glass: it's the human equivalent of those machines they have at the dentist's for automatically refilling your take-a-rinse water glass. But you're grateful for the high ratio of staff when you need to visit the loo, which again is approached via a secret wooden door camouflaged in the restaurant's wood and mirror-lined interior. Even the waiter leading me to this secret door couldn't locate the whereabouts of the sensor that magicked it open, forcing him to wave his arms high and low, as if beseeching the gods to let him in. It lends a quaint Indiana Jones feel to the evening.
The food? Half a dozen small courses, each deconstructed in detail by the French waiters, as if they'd all been diligently studying for their oral exam in Japanese cuisine and were relieved to have been able to recite it word perfect. Some diners will find it useful to know that they are eating shiso rice or eel kabayaki with kinome pepper even though they haven't a clue what a shiso leaf is, nor what kabayaki or kinome get up to when they're at home. I guess others might feel disheartened about eating food that needs to be explained to you first.
Dishes such as green tea tofu, or ribbons of sea bream with grated daikon, sashimi, nuggets of sushi, white miso soup, salmon with burdock root, were all tasty enough. But they are examples from the cuisine of a country where your local fruit stall might stock five grades of strawberry: the difference is often imperceptible to a foreigner. Two cuts of tuna can be millimetres apart on the fish, but many hundreds of yen apart in price for each sliver on your plate. The quality of the food at Umu is pretty good, but it doesn't bewitch you the way a kaiseki banquet in Japan might. Still, if you have a fat wallet, and you like to scoff your sushi in a stylish room with a thrum of music rumbling the furniture, as opposed to the sanctuary-like atmosphere of some Japanese restaurants in London, then Umu is up your street.
"OK, I need to leave now. Can someone let me out? Open sesame! Is there a secret button? Or maybe a special floorboard you have to tread on? Will 'Shazam!' do it? Hello? Anybody?…"
Score: 5/10
Open lunch and dinner every day, except Sunday.
Giles Coren is away
