It is 16 years since I went to eat in Tokyo, alone, and came back terminally befuddled, like Lemuel Gulliver. I had seen the superior gastronomic civilisation of those culinary Houyhnhnms and found myself, on my return, unable to contain my disgust at the Yahoo food on offer in the land of my birth.
Gulliver did actually go to Tokyo – or Edo, as it then was – on the voyage that took in Laputa, Japan being as preposterously exotic and improbable a destination in 1726 (closed as it then was to outside travellers) as any land of giants or midgets or talking horses.
And it wasn’t a lot less improbable in 2005. Talking toilets that opened to greet you when you walked in the room, and licked your bum clean when you’d done? A fish market the size of Wales, where men with head torches and meat hooks gathered before dawn to bid hundreds of thousands of pounds for single tuna fish, and then carted them away on trolleys? Truckers sitting up at sushi counters in their overalls, eating better than any Mayfair millionaire? A food utensil district with six knife streets and two entirely dedicated to plastic display sushi? Whole restaurants devoted to single specialities – sushi, tempura, tonkatsu, tofu – with the only ones that offered all of these under one roof, such as Nobu, dismissively monickered “Japanese restaurant” and patronised only by tourists?
It blew my mind. I had a bad case of what they now call “white explorer syndrome” and hang you for. But I was white, and I was exploring, and what else could I do?
I didn’t have a clue. I had no reservations anywhere, nor any way of navigating, as I couldn’t read either maps or street names. I just wandered through doors and sat down and ate, and everything was wonderful: the worst place I ate out in Tokyo was better than the best place I had eaten anywhere else, so addresses didn’t matter.
Advertisement
And they don’t really do street names anyway, a woman called Setsuyo told me, when I stopped her to ask the way. She took pity on me and led me round the city for a few days, helping me find things I didn’t know I was looking for, like the higgledy-piggledy old izakayas squished between skyscrapers, with very small, very cold beers and brilliant yakitori. Anachronisms amid the steel and glass that felt, loud music aside, like relics of Gulliver’s time.
Japanese eating in Britain has got a lot better since then, of course, and there is a lot more of it. Last week I was handfed omakase in W1 by a brilliant young chef from Fukayama and next week I’ll be at a new place in W12 from a favourite Japanese chef of mine, whose domestic delivery service in lockdown saved my tenth wedding anniversary from disaster.
And this week it’s an izakaya in EC2, with no Japanese people involved in it at all, so deeply has their way of eating filtered into the northern European mainstream. It’s on the site of the much missed Merchants Tavern, a casualty of lockdown, which former co-owner Dominic Lake (who was in it with Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick) has resuscitated in partnership with the brilliant Rohit Chugh of Roti Chai (he is one of the great menu development men of our time) and chef Jude Sam, formerly of Villandry, and named Apothecary for the old Victorian drugs business that used to operate here.
Now, listen, I have known Dominic for 30 years. We worked a bar together in the early 1990s and I ran into him again when he was co-founding Canteen in the middle Noughties, that small chain of very British brasseries that seemed to be absolutely the way forward for a few years, and then suddenly wasn’t. I liked Merchants Tavern and I hear good things about Spiritland, a booze and music operation of his that I haven’t investigated (because one of those two just isn’t my thing – and it’s not booze), but if you want to ignore my good opinion of the place because I love the guy, that’s fine. It’s totally fine. (Although I love a lot of guys with very bad restaurants, believe me, and I do not recommend or review them.)
And, anyway, it may just be that when someone says to you “Japanese inspired but with Hoxton energy” you reach for the sick bag and go elsewhere, and I couldn’t blame you for that either. But you’d be missing out, honest.
Advertisement
The almost dauntingly large room (it is a party space, really, and that’s still the vibe – they have live DJs and stuff at weekends, in case you *shudder* like that sort of thing) has been segmented with screens and plants and a big wooden robata bar, but I never got in there. Taking the izakaya thing at its most literal (“Stay drink place”), I just met some people for a snifter at the bar out front, which is still very pubby, except for posh new copper lights from Tom Dixon, and drank mostly Japanese beer and a couple of really exceptional cocktails and yodelled for something salty when hunger came on.
First out were a couple of skewers of pork belly, spring onion-scattered, buttery-fatty and sweet with miso, like a dulce de leche of pork, and some fries seasoned with salt and nori seaweed, with gochujang mayo. A couple of negronis. A glance towards the restaurant. A request for Japanese fried chicken, which came deliriously light and fluffy and crisp on account of the potato starch coating, and some fried chicken hirata buns with sriracha mayo, because you can’t have too much fried chicken or spicy mayo. No, you can’t.
We flipped to saké then, because it didn’t look likely that we’d bother to penetrate the interior (who needs a restaurant when you’ve got food this good at the bar?), and drank it out of gorgeous little eggcups made, like all the crockery, by Sue Pryke of Leicestershire (that’s two weeks in a row I’ve told you who made the crockery – I promise I’ll stop it now, I know you don’t care).
There were more skewers, of teriyaki chicken and spring onion, which were excellent, and wagyu, which I’m never that bothered by, and then a couple of buns filled with short rib of beef, gochujang, kimchi, all that stuff, and then, of course, you’re getting pretty bloody full there, on your bar stool, feeling more than ever like a plump old bull frog on a lily pad. I had come with my tennis coach (she is mostly a mate, but she is also my tennis coach. It’s a passion project for her. She thinks I could go all the way, still being so young...) and just looking at her makes me feel fat at the best of times.
Still, I found room for all manner of inside-out rolls (Cornish crab, spicy tuna etc), some raw fish dishes of the tiradito type (like ceviche but sliced, rather than chunked, and probably better consumed more mindfully, before the meat, appreciating its muscle and acidity, when one is a bit less pissed, but that’s pub eating for you) and then the show-stopping dish of the night (though, to be fair, by now my show had pretty much stopped anyway), which was, weirdly, the aubergine, a miso-glazed tap-dance along the boundary between sweet and savoury, with the skin crisped and kind of baconny, dry-fried spring onions tossed in for sparkle and also raw ones for a green reality check. Historic. The vegan in me (he is definitely there; he went to Vegan Pizza Express the other week, after all) was a little disappointed with himself for all the fish and chicken and pork and beef he’d eaten, and began to regret not having stuck to the aubergine and the very good kimchi rice.
Advertisement
But he was drunk by then and waxing lachrymose. I’ll have to take him back to Japan soon, to cheer him up. Hell, we’ll all have to go.
Apothecary
36 Charlotte Road, London EC2 (020 7060 5335; apothecaryeast.co.uk)
Food 7
Booze 8
Izakayatasticness 9
Score 8
Price A tenner if you’re just here for a cocktail. £30 if you’re snacking. £60 if you’re porking out big time.
