Table talk

There are small groups of ­Bumbles and Barkises in the wine bars, complaining about their agents.

London west of Hammersmith is the land of nod. A city in early retirement and sedimentary self-employment. ­Every large burgh has somewhere like this. It’s the settle-for place. Chiswick is London’s all-purpose second choice. If you can’t afford Notting Hill or Kensington, if you need one more bedroom than you can manage in Battersea, this is where you tip up. The brave-face ville. Not quite failure, but not really success. Handy for Heathrow, the locals will tell you, and a lovely bit of the river, which is true, if you want to watch other ­people jet off on holidays you can’t ­afford, or drown yourself.

I rather like Chiswick. It’s somewhere where you can put your loose, small pity, and it’s all about one street, Chiswick High Road, that goes on longer than Dombey and Son — west London’s ­gastronomic Via Dolorosa, a record-breaking chain of restaurants, cafes, takeaways and bars. There are thousands of them along a two-mile sluice of cappuccino froth and frying oil, but an odd thing is happening here. They’re getting better. This is the third time in as many months I’ve been prodded back to Chiswick.

Hedone, the singular Scandinavian restaurant, was the best in ­London the night I ate, and there’s also a Soho House, like a frontier fortress, a harbinger of media groovery, promising that Chiswick is going to be Net-a-porter-clad and fashion-forward, but bad-backed. The glitterati must be ­larging it to go, every night, and I think I see what’s happening. Chiswick is expanding its second-bestness to become the alternative Shoreditch, the beating heart of thinning, elasticated Ugg-cool.

Camilla, the stern editrix, and I took Gemma Soames, who is sadly leaving Style for Hong Kong, which is a sort of hectic, humid Chiswick. We went to Chisou, a Japanese restaurant whose Mayfair sister many people consider the best sushi place in London, an anorexic’s hurl from Vogue House. People who like ­sushi tend to keep league tables of things, and gravitate towards Vogue House.

This one is in a back passage in ­Chiswick. It’s not even close to ­Exchange and Mart, and an odd place to expand to. It’s in a dark, modern, utilitarian bit of a building that looks like a planner’s offcut. There are booths in the slatted Japanese manner, bits of hanging stuff that aren’t curtains or flags, and ­benches. How is it that Japanese seats are more arse-torturing than anyone else’s? They put little cushions on them that only make them harder. What do they have against comfort? What did soft furnishings ever do to the Japanese?

We sat down and a smiley, breathily friendly waitress came to take the drinks order. In the traditional way, she had apparently learnt English from the ­instruction manuals of digital cameras and DVD players. After much jolly ­misunderstanding, I felt I’d ordered a battered lap dance and the occupation of Singapore, but managed to get a cup of tea instead, and a bucket of sake for the laydeez. The choice of tea was a bad start. There was only English mint or jasmine. No Japanese tea, which is one of the few joys of Japan. What came was a tea bag.

(HO)

We started with edamame beans, as you do. The dullest snack ever invented. The only remote pleasure in edamame is opening the pod with your teeth. ­Inside, it’s still a bean that tastes like it’s come from Ryman. Edamame beans are the beans that the bean-counters count. It always amazes me that soya is one of the world’s biggest crops. We grow more than 3 billion bushels, and ­although I’m not entirely au fait with the dimensions of a bushel, I’m sure they’re bigger than Japanese cushions, and I suspect that’s a lot. America, you’ll be interested to know, exports more than $23 billion of soya beans a year.

They can’t all be Japanese nibbles. And then we had dumplings that looked like sumo ­wrestlers’ gum guards and tasted faintly of fat boys’ bad breath. There was a plate of barely grilled and slivered beef in a watery brown sauce that was ­perfectly unobtrusive, and sidled down the gullet with a little bow and a whispered ­“Excuse me”.

Sushi is Chisou’s big thing, and we got a lot of it. The waitress said they were particularly proud of their maki rolls, though she could well have been saying that I had some seaweed stuck to my teeth. The big rolls with avocado and tuna and mayo and stuff are far more American than oriental. They’re made for people who admire delicacy and aesthetic frugality, but actually want a big, mouth-appealing, slobbery chew. These ones tasted like rolled-up Pret A Manger sandwiches. I must admit that I don’t swoon for sushi the way that many of the women I work with do.

Japanese is rarely my first choice for lunch or ­dinner. I appreciate it rather than love it. They had nice fatty tuna. Not the palest, most oleaginous silky belly, but good fish, and the rice, really the best part, was the right temperature and perfectly cooked, though it tended to collapse ­under the rod. This could well be my ­dyslexic chopstick skills (try saying that 10 times, fast). Altogether, the sushi was fine. No better. What you might expect from a superior bento box, of the sort you can get in any airport.

Pudding was a fruit selection, an ­orange cut like a Rubik’s cube and those strange Arcimboldo things that are grown only for oriental fruit displays and are never meant to be eaten. There were three balls of ice cream, which included green tea. All Japanese res­taurants have green-tea ice cream — I think it’s a ­stip­ulation in the lease — and it ­always tastes like glaziers’ putty. I would have liked to have had some green tea as tea. And there was chestnut ice cream, ­uncannily tasting of sucked matchsticks.

At 2.30pm, the waitress charmingly told us the kitchen was closing, and could we get a move on, as they had ­better things to do. I might have misheard the last bit. There was only one other occupied table, a group of passed-over TV executives kicking around a new ­adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities. I think they said it was to be set in ­Chiswick and Kabul.