Saki

In a restaurant in Kyoto that served only fish 70 ways, and all of it mackerel, I asked my charming and sophisticated guide, a man who bore an uncanny resemblance to the bonsai teacher in The Karate Kid, and who had spent a professional life fixing for western journalists, if he would teach me about Japanese table manners.

"Oh, no, I couldn't," he said, staring modestly at the table.

No, please, I won't be insulted, tell me when I get it wrong and tell me why. "No, no, I couldn't."

Look, I write about food, I need to know, so please teach me.

I won't be offended. "No, no, I couldn't."

Look here, I'm paying you. He had an agonised mien. "No I mean I couldn't, because it isn't possible. You wouldn't understand. You are not sensitive to Japanese thinking. We," he waved a chopstick at the room, "have all agreed that foreigners are excused table manners. When you make infantile mess and clumsy, embarrassing mistake with fingers and gross rudeness with your mouth, when you eat with insulting selfishness, when you are ungrateful and western, we don't see it. We are blind to your lack of finesse and sensitivity."

Oh, righty-ho, then. Well, just tell me one thing. "Don't leave chopsticks in rice. It is sign of death."

Right. And, I suppose, don't make rude noises eating soup. "No, Benny Hill noises very good and pleasant."

Right. Well, you know we laugh at you because you can't pronounce your rs? "Weally?"

Japan is the only country I've ever been to that wants tourists not to understand what they are looking at. It thinks people who aren't born Japanese are psychologically, intellectually, spiritually and aesthetically incapable of understanding their culture. Each time you are confronted by seven rocks in gravel, two lilies in a pot, a dwarf Christmas tree, a bedroom without a bed or a limerick without a joke, a polite little local will say "Sorry, very Japanese, difficult to explain", which translates as: "You are too cretinously oafish and hairy to comprehend the finer feelings that are needed to admire this teapot in all its sublime simplicity."

To respond, smile with as much patronage as you can muster and say: "Yes, it's a pity you'll never know what your decorative plagiarised trinket civilisation looks like through sophisticated western eyes." Or: "How droll of you to have so many Elvis impersonators, and to make one of them prime minister."

The one area where we really do have to doff our bowlers to the children of the rising sun is in the kitchen. No community goes to the same neurotic and aesthetic lengths for lunch as the Japanese. The skills involved in preparing, growing and serving food are way beyond those considered decent, necessary or appropriate in other cultures. What is particularly memorable (and here, my admiration is irony-free) is that the exhaustingly complex dexterity and care of preparation produces the purest form of simplicity. That is some trick.

Japan's is a fish- and rice-based cuisine. A Japanese person may go for months without eating meat. There are plenty of communities that survive on staple fish, but I can't think of one as numerous, advanced or ravenous. The Japanese gastronomy is more at risk from collapsing stocks than any other. Overfishing will have a dramatic effect on the culture, so sticking a Japanese restaurant next to a meat market might look like being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or it might be missionary work.

Saki is a dining room, in a basement, next to Smithfield meat market. This area has turned into an eating-out spot, with the now venerable Club Gascon and the popular, red-blooded Smiths. The streets are overflowing with the sort of braying, wide-mouthed, hair-gelled City lizards who make you pray for a cleansing depression. Saki looks like most Japanese restaurants; that is, nothing at all. It's odd how the minimal elegance of Tokyo translates as cheap absence when it reaches Europe. The walls are red. The chairs have two more legs than the waiters.

Although I admire Japanese food, I can't warm to it. I rarely yearn for it, and can barely raise an eyebrow over particularly fatty belly tuna. It's never going to be my soul food. I know that my experience is not of the same order as that of the Japanese man next to me. Every time I watch a sushi chef in a chic western bar, I think: "Pearls before swine." But Japanese food has become the Lego of urban eating out, and as the maki rolls grow fatter and sloppier and more like seaweed wraps, and the sushi gets additional mayo and bacon, I respect it less and less.

Saki's menu, though, is laudably catholic. We had a round-eyed waiter called Steve, who was charmingly out of his depth in the complex simplicity of Japanese culture. We ordered what you always order, which is pretty much everything: I have virtually no barometer for knowing when enough is enough. Steve came back with a furrowed brow. "The kitchen wants you to know that you've ordered an enormous amount of food, sort of way too much."

"Never mind," I said breezily. "Bring it on. I've got worms."

You see, the waiter would never say that in a Polish restaurant. It's another inexplicable thing about the Japanese - they think it's disgusting if you eat because you're hungry. Having a public appetite is like having sex with a dolphin in your mother's bed on Cherry Blossom Day, so the haiku goes.

Saki's food was pretty good. The fried courgette teriyaki was nice, the agedashi tofu was less like congealed river scum than usual, the sushi rice was nicely judged, if you care about judging sushi rice - which is a bit like caring about the bass woofers in your car stereo. Best of all were the udon noodles: boring but decent, they came with excellent Benny Hill noises.

Finally, Steve said: "That's everything."

Everything? But my parasites are still squeaking like blind chicks in a tripe nest. Bring more.

"More?" he said in awe. And before we all broke out into Food, Glorious Food, he brought more sushi.

I counted 28 items on the bill. For four people, it came to £219 - £21 of which was for drink. Now that's a whole lot of money, but like everything else about the Japs, the normal rules of value don't apply. It was cheaper than I expected.

Saki has a dark bar for young people with spots, and overall, it is perfectly good at what it does. But the experience is, if not instantly forgettable, indistinguishable from a score of other similar restaurants. London's Japanese restaurants are like raw-fish Starbucks: they lack the essential ethereal dexterity and the ever so humble hubris, the Gilbert and Sullivan vanity, that makes eating in Japan so unique.

SAKI