Sake No Hana
23 St James’s Street,
SW1; 020 7925 8988
Lunch, daily, noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-midnight, Sun, 6pm-11pm

Five stars: Samurai
Four stars: Banzai
Three stars: Haiku
Two stars: Sumo
One star: Hara-kiri

This is agony, like drawing teeth. Like drawing goats’ teeth. Actually, I’ve never tried to draw goats’ teeth, but I did once kill, skin and joint a goat, with a Swiss army knife. If you’ve ever wondered what the pointy thing was for, it’s useful for prizing open ungulates’ ball-and-socket joints.

It’s agony, because I’m trying to write this on holiday. People who say “I’m going somewhere quiet and hot to write a book” are people who die unpublished. The first rule of writing is, don’t do it with a view. Actually, the first rule of writing is, have something worth writing about – an instruction I jaywalk through on a weekly basis. But the second rule of writing is, bin the view. I look up and there’s the damned thing, a vista. Palm trees, tropical stuff, big flowers that look like elaborately diseased sexual organs, coarse-voiced, gaudy birds, an infinity pool, the sea, the sky. Oh, hell.

Who invented the infinity pool? They’ve taken over the world. Open a glossy magazine and there are dozens of them. Infinity pools are the most earth-changing feature since Mr Otis came up with the safety lift, and invented life after the seventh floor. Why are they called infinity? They’re not, are they? They don’t stretch on into the universe until they meet themselves round the back. They’re actually ponds that are just too full. They’re spilt pools. I think their attraction is the naughtiness, like overflowing the bath on purpose.

Oh my God, did we leave the bath running? No, it’s just the infinity pool. We’re on holiday. Tee-hee.

So here it is, the hot view, spilling over into whatever I’m suppposed to be looking at in my head. I’ve just done something rather juvenile, something I haven’t done for years. It’s holidays. They give us permission to regress, to wear clothes that are too young, drink things that need planning permission, try positions. Nobody over 20 should ever assume a position. I bought War and Peace – again. This must be my eighth or ninth War and Peace. I feel like a teenager again. There are two things you know you’re never going to pick up on holiday: the mulatto waitress with green eyes, and War and Peace. It’s embarrassing just getting caught with it. It’s the cultural equivalent of a Porsche. Or a hair weave.

“Not War and Peace,” the Blonde rolled her eyes. “Are you really going to carry that around with you? It’s like wearing Speedos or getting a Hawaiian tattoo. Don’t you think you’re a bit old for Tolstoy? What about a nice Ian McEwan?” No, I think I can handle it. I think I can pull it off. It’s on my list, you see, the hideous guilt-slimed list of the unread, the unread that come to you in the night and haunt your bedside table: Proust, Pope, Cervantes, Jackie Collins, all dancing in the dark. Everyone else in the literate world has lists of books they have read; only the educated English have lists of books they haven’t.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering,” the Blonde said. “We all know how it ends.” For some years now, I’ve been looking for a neat definition for “an intellectual”. And someone who knows how it ends before it starts seems to be pretty damned accurate.

So far, I’ve managed to get through the introduction, and I’m fascinated to learn that Tolstoy used rhythmic repetition a lot. Well, in 1,215 pages, you probably need to. And his shortest sentence is: “Drops dripped.” Commendably terse, illustrative, onomatopaeic, and just this side of repetitive. I wonder if he struggled with “drips dropped”, but then thought, sod it, I’ve another 1,214 longhand, dip-penned pages to go. And only four more years. He was also, I’m about to find out, inordinately partial to chiasmi. I’m sure you already know what they are, because you got all those constipated bog grammar books for Christmas. But I had to ask. Apparently, it’s the dramatic use of opposites in a sentence. As in: “The prime minister rose to the dispatch box like a lion, but like a lamb retired.” I’m bated and breathless. Which you’ll notice is a short sentence, but a chiasmus not.

Sake No Hana has opened on the site that used to be Shumi and, before that, Che. It’s all gastro-archeology now. These food empires burn bright, then gutter, with profligate, Gadarene rapidity. This is a premium site on St James’s, but it has logistical problems, most notably escalators, which always make me feel I’m going to toddlers, china, sports equipment and electricals. In this incarnation, the restaurant is partnered by a Mr Lebedev, a Russian, who may or may not appear as a short sentence in War and Peace. No expense has been spared; but, more surprisingly, what has been spared is ostentation and opulence. It’s a bit like being inside an Amish barn-raising, where someone’s spiked the lemonade with acid. The Blonde said it reminded her of a giant game of Jenga.

It is a Japanese restaurant. Japanese food is the infinity pool of eating out. The name means something opaquely obvious and random in the Japanese way, like “sake’s good for you”. They make you take off your shoes, which I can’t bear. It’s a sort of striptease dress code. And, instead of sitting on the floor, which I hate even more, they’ve compromised and lowered the floor under the table. The effect is neither squatting nor sitting, more like trying to eat fish with sticks at an infant school. It’s arse torture.

The night we were in, there was Lakshmi Mittal, with a lot of children, and Rocco Forte, with a lot of Germans. There is an infantalised plutocrat buzz going on. Criticising Japanese food is like writing Which? reports on hi-fi systems. It’s all about increments in technical detail, the geek’s law of diminishing returns, minute differences in temperature and cut. Every woman in London with a handbag that costs more than the annual wage in Benin is an expert on sushi. The high point for me was the box of steamed wagu beef, cooked at the table. It cost about as much as a handbag, and tasted blandly fine, like beef that’s been steamed. What I liked about it was that they had imported the cow from Australia. It was served by a Pole, in a restaurant owned by a Russian. There’s something very Japanese about that.

And the sushi is very good, in the way that one DVD player is much better than another very good DVD player. It was well cut, with the right proportion of fish to rice, and at a pleasant temperature. Is it frozen, I asked the very oriental Pole. No, she said, with a shocked expression. Certainly not. None of our fish is frozen. It’s all very fresh. Well, then, someone’s in trouble. European hygiene legislation states that all fishery products eaten raw or almost raw must be frozen to -20C or colder for at least 24 hours, and a document stating so must accompany the fish. If you don’t believe me, it’s regulation 853/2004, annex 3, section 8. Someone looks as if they’re going to get a visit from the bearded man with the thermometer and the mouse-dropping tweezers. Ice crystals form in fish and break up its texture; the best way to avoid this is to freeze it to -40C in a torry tunnel (no idea), or with nitrogen, neither of which is what your faddish sushi customer wants to hear. But it is authentically Japanese: much of the tuna in Tokyo’s ocean-emptying fish market is frozen solid. If chic, expensive sushi is what you like, then this is the sort of restaurant you’ll like it in.

I’m off to a table under a palm tree on a beach. The Seychelles is one of the biggest exporters of tuna, and my sashimi is still quivering.

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