Sake No Hana

I used my Taste Card at this restaurant so most of the food was half price. Great value! I went with a girl friend on a Wednesday night and we were both really impressed by it. The waiters were attentive and professional. The layout is slightly weird, you can't exit the same way you came in… I thought the escalator to reach the restaurant was a nice touch- it was exciting! The decor is perfect, a lot of wood everywhere- it's a great experience. The food was cooked really well and the waiters will happily recommend dishes to you if you're a bit stuck. Tuna Tartare was really flavoursome, definitely recommend it!

Literally meaning ‘Sake Flower’, Sake No Hana has had a recent facelift, transforming the ground floor entrance with a little cocktail bar. Gone are the Japanese Tatami tables which have made way for a more slick dining room, concentrating on normal seating with an open kitchen prep area poised for showmanship.

You wouldn’t expect a restaurant to have escalators inside, but they do at Sake No Hana and once at the top the dining room reminds me of a Swedish sauna with wood clad walls and flooring, all earth-Motherish and soothing. A vast contrast from the electric blue lights and dark black panelling of the slick, chic interior of Yau’s Hakkasan design choice.

Service is impeccable and polished and the menu, courtesy of Chef Daisuke Hayashi, is several pages long but features lots of traditional dishes like ‘Shabu Shabu’ as well as the more common Robata grill selections and a huge selection of assorted Tempuras. We chose an assortment of dishes including seared razor clams with wasabi and soya, rib-beef tataki, braised aubergine with duck, seared tuna and green tea soba salad, Iberico pork and ribeye beef Shabu Shabu and a selection of sushi including the crunchy Alaskan snow crab maki rolls.

At first bite the razor clams are delicate and sweet and accompanying wasabi and soya dressing is pleasant and not overpowering in anyway. Beef tataki is as it should be with thinly sliced slivers of raw beef with a delicious sesame dressing and the thick ruby slices of seared tuna are a delight accompanied by green tea soba noodle salad, which is nice enough although the yoghurt like dressing seems a little out of place.

The braised aubergine with duck is a real triumph served in a small bowl with dainty cubes of aubergine in a deep and glossy sauce and sitting underneath them hides a little shredded duck and red bean paste. The duck has imparted a meaty rich flavour into the sauce and the whole thing is just beyond delicious.

I am very excited about the arrival of the Shabu Shabu, after my experience in Tokyo, getting to have it again in London will remind me of my wonderful trip around Japan last year. Top quality Iberico pork and ribeye beef, thinly sliced and assembled on a platter with some greens, including rocket. A bubbling cauldron of stock is placed on the table on top of a flame to keep the stock bubbling and hot.

I pile the vegetables and some of the meat into the broth and once cooked remove it ready for my first hit of taste explosion and I have to say I was a tad disappointed. The stock is the crux of this dish and although I could not fault the quality of ingredients, the stock was not packed with intense flavour and in fact was too bland to deliver the expected wow-factor, which at £37 a pop, can be disappointing.

The sushi, nigiri and maki rolls arrive and the superior quality of the fish is evident and each piece is expertly sliced and prepared, demonstrating the expert-hands of the in-house Sushi dons. What really impressed me was the freshness and incredible sweet flesh of the plump seared scallop nigiri and the deliciously crunchy Alaskan snow crab maki rolls. A rich green tea crème brulee and a gooey chocolate fondant give the meal a predictable but nevertheless enjoyable ending that leaves us very satisfied indeed.

Sake No Hana can definitely hold its own in St James. They are however, neither innovators nor trend-setters in the field of Japanese Cuisine and thankfully have steered well clear of the outdated trend ‘fusion’ dishes that seemed to sweep through pseudo-Japanese restaurants in London at one time. Instead, what they do offer is excellent sushi as well as some other great Japanese dishes and I really like what they are doing here.

Sake No Hana feels comfortable, intimate and not remotely pretentious like some of the other well known celeb-laden Japanese eateries (mentioning no names…) in the vicinity. So if you want great food, attentive service in an un-fussy environment than Sake No Hana is for you. But if WAG culture, drunk D-list celebrities and rude staff and generic service is what your after then head to Berkeley Street for your Sushi.

What would otherwise have been an indifferent dining experience was rescued by the amusement value of being spectacularly bad. Indifferent sushi that would have been OK at half the price in Chiswick, served by often willing but completely incompetent largely non-Japanese staff with about as much empathy towards the Japanese dining experience as Welsh steel workers trying to dance Swan Lake… The headwaitress clacked up and down the corridor of the downstairs Sushi bar at great speed with steel-tipped heels, which made on feel as if at the Nuerenberg rally. Food was slammed down on the table by her with all the finesse of a transport cafe in Yorkshire. A request for warm saki completely threw the assembled waiting staff, and it eventually appeared with pudding. They had lost the initial reservation. No one from the hat check girl to any of the waiting staff seemed to have the faintest idea what they were doing. And the only thing of any interest on the menu was sushi and sashimi which was perfectly OK but quite unexceptional. Even the escalator wasn't working, adding to the impression of a mangement that couldn't care less. The restaurant was fairly busy, perhaps owing to the 40% discounted offer, since it was otherwise impossible to understand why anyone with any familarity with good Japanese restaurants would come here.

I love this place, we went in a group of 6 girls (and I would definitely recommend that you go in a group) and from the cool decor as you walk in, to the very attentive and helpful service, to the way the tables are laid out giving you plenty space to be comfortable and a good distance between the next group, the gorgeous cocktails and extensive sake list, the moist and divine sushi ending with the very reasonable bill, this is place was wonderful. The only dishes I would not recommend are the crab wrapped in seabass, its tiny and tasteless, and tempura but thats because I just cannot see the point of this oily tasteless dish at any establishment. The aubergine with sesame was the surprise dish of the day. The wine list was reasonable, we ordered a lovely Vouvray for a mere £27.

The place is huge, but looked a bit empty when I have visited it on for a weekend dinner. Waiting for the lift to get to the toilet can be quite irritating, however the interiour is very pleasant and original with lots of light wood, typical for restaurants in Japan. The choice of sake and Japanese whisky was very large and reasonably priced. The food was ok, however nothing special, though we did not order much, just some suchi, starters and miso soup, so maybe missed out the core specialities.

The experience of Sake no Hana starts weirdly: one is forced onto an escalator as if shopping at a department store. Then, once inside the restaurant, there is a lot of wood and it is rather pleasant, but enough with designblabla, let's talk about the food. The menu is very different from any japanese restaurant that I have ever eaten at – including the ones in Japan. There is very little way in knowing how much you are ordering as some dishes are great for 2 or even 3 people sharing while others aren't even enough for one. The sashimi (hamachi, scallop, o-toro) was very good, but cut too thinly. The chilean seabass was delicious, the black cod rice far too sweet and the grilled yellowtail unfortunately dry. We also ordered one of the waguy beef dishes (the small one) which arrived in a little pot with carrots (?), potatoes (??) and some strange jellyfied stock cubes (???) – bizarre and not at all complementary to the tender beef. One thing stands out though: the sake list. It's incredible, they even offer sparkling sake (which I really liked – but maybe because I tasted other 2 types of sake beforehand). Service was overall friendly and helpfull, although I waited 10 minutes for a little wasabi. However, I am going back to eat more raw fish as I want to give Sake No Hana the benefit of doubt.

I've dined a couple of times recently at Sake No Hana and am glad for it. I first visited the venue not too long after it opened and it was pleasant then, but I wouldn't have rushed back. A year later and they seemed to have cured the previous issues – with service, some of the dishes and the non existent wine list. On my last visit I dined with a group of close colleagues and was blown away. We did slightly over-order but had decided to sample as much as possible and managed to get through a grand total of 24 dishes. The starters of King crab and cucumber sunomono, Chicken and kanpyo maki roll were particular favourites and mains of Miso Chilean seabass in houba leaf, Red king crab in ponzu and Wagyu beef with mountain yam were all dishes I'd quite happily mug my colleagues for. Prices can get astronomical for larger tables so while I personally can't afford to eat there as often as I'd like I will return as often as possible. Although they do now have a wine selection I'd urge diners to skip this and speak with the Sake sommelier who picked the perfect choices to go with our feast. Service was excellent and the grace and delicacy of the waitresses made the experience all the more authentic (In an uber-chic contemporary environment of course!).

The service was very poor with our wine arriving 20 mins after we'd ordered and meals being forgotten. One to miss.

I just do not get why Sake No Hana has got a following from some celebs – it taking a space that has never really worked for restaurants, you have to go up in an escalator to the room and then down in a lift to the loos! Avoid the sunken seats if you do not want to take your shoes off or suffer backache.

New Japanese restaurant are in a difficult position as they are immediately compared with Zuma or Nobu – while Sake No Hana tries to deliver more traditional Japanese dishes I don't think it beats them for an overall experience. Or maybe it is just that I prefer the 'modern' twist to Japanese food. Service at the beginning was decidedly average but I hear it has improved now. Very expensive – probably just geared at Russians.