Of course, I'm not much better. My constant opposition of the status quo when it comes to recent trends can be thrown right back in my face. I'm miles from kicking against the system, always thinking I'm on the moral high ground but actually part of the problem. Mind you, I suppose that's what being a critic is all about.
Back to celebrities then; I think they deserve a bit more of my ire for now. It is a racing certainty that I don't care where the Beckhams live, eat or worship. I don't give a hoot what sort of micro-dress one of them has been seen in and I certainly couldn't care how many absurdly-named children they're going to have. As an aside, the fact that their oldest is called Brooklyn, the city of his conception, gave me a good giggle many years ago. My favourite three places he should've been conceived, you ask..? Peckham, Beckenham and Chipping Sodbury.
What am I getting at? Firstly, the point that no matter how immune to the artificially-flavoured celebrity hype machine we think we are, they're always permeating our consciousness. It's a sad state of affairs and one that I blame anyone other than me for. Secondly, the Beckhams remain all over the papers, television and the internet and I'm unsure exactly why. But it is worth noting that they do eat. And when they are in London, they have been known to eat at Nobu.
Nobu has long been a popular celebrity eatery in London. It has served kicky, trendy Japanese food for almost fifteen years, acquiring a Michelin Star along the way, which it has steadily kept through thick and thin. Usually if some famous sort or other is in town, they'll be seen pulling up in a taxi, limousine or chauffer-driven monstrosity outside the Metropolitan Hotel.
Nobu, the eponymous chain belonging to legendary chef Nobu Matsuhisa, has locations on just about every continent. The first restaurant was founded in California in 1987, with an avalanche of others following London's place 10 years later. The empire's growth shows no sign of slowing, with venues opening in such unpredictable locations as Budapest, Mykonos, Mexico City and Cape Town.
A friend was hosting a birthday dinner at Nobu and the other half and I couldn't say no when we were invited. Celebrity-spotting be damned, we were just after what is supposedly the some of the finest top-end Japanese in Europe. There were nine of us, we were all expecting to be impressed and none of us cared about seeing anyone famous. With that in mind, Nobu had a task on its hands.
First off, Nobu is pretty dark. Not in the cool, David Lynch sense of the word - just poorly lit. I'm all for a touch of gloom giving some mystique to a restaurant, but this place is more grimly shrouded than mysteriously wrapped. We were led to our table after a couple of minutes' loitering by the bar and started to discuss the technicalities of ordering. Unfortunately, half the table wanted the tasting menu and half didn't. Happily (and a touch surprisingly) they said this was fine, provided we didn't mind some courses coming at different times.
The first thing to impress me at Nobu was the endemame; fresh green peas still in the pod with a little salt. Their warm, cloudy greenery was a lovely start to the evening. Something about sitting in this over-stuffed, over-sexed, under-lit gossip column whilst eating some of the simplest, most down-to-earth Japanese food was satisfyingly contradictory. With a promising pre-starter out of the way, we looked towards the menu and started assembling our orders.
The other half and I get around to our fair share of eating out. We know good food and she in particular knows good Japanese food. Rather than hopping on the tasting menu train, we opted to put together our own sample menu to run the place through its paces. It was a gruelling and expensive task but I think we got a decent spread of the place without overstretching.
I had a rather inconvenient moment before the food came. With good Asian food, a little tea is a must, so we ordered a pot of jasmine to start us off. Now good jasmine tea should be light, rural, rustic and never too strong. I was presented with a very sweet little teapot of foul, bitter slop which the staff insisted was quite authentic and exactly as it should be. Either I've been drinking imitation stuff for years or Nobu don't know simple tea.
There is a lot Nobu don't know, as it turns out. They don't know if you throw a decent steak on a sizzling hot stone then pelt the thing with ponzu lemon sauce, it will ruin a nice piece of meat. They don't know that when you mix foie gras with wagyu beef - allegedly the best you can get in Japan - in gyoza (small, dry but delicious dumpling casings), it's imperative that neither ingredient is lost in the mix. Never mind both.
If you can catch a whiff of the sort of derision I might usually reserve for distasteful celebrity gossip, I warn you I'm just getting started. As well as the dishes above, we ate sashimi and two kinds of tempura. Along with dessert. Now the raw stuff was not bad. We tried o-toro tuna, crab and jumbo shrimp (left). The shrimp in particular was very good. But here comes my real issue with Nobu: price. Those three pieces of sashimi cost almost £20. And they were not that good. Not £20 good. Maybe this is why celebrities come here?
King crab tempura with onions was also enjoyable in that I will happily eat just about anything that's been deep-fried in Japanese batter. To be fair to them, the crab was properly juicy and well-preserved in the tempura. We also sampled a variety of standard tempura (scallop, squid and pumpkin) which were all also very nice (right). But again, too expensive. This is the sort of stuff you can get for a tenner as a meal set in Asakusa or any Japanese place worth its salt. And don't even start with the "you're paying for the experience" rubbish: this isn't food which needs a fanfare, it's all in the taste. £24 for the tempura set here seems reasonable when you look at the rest of the menu, but it's not.That's more or less the problem with Nobu for me. The food was not terribly bad (apart from the two beef aberrations) but the place is cruelly unwelcoming when it comes to what you're paying. It's not like some of the other expensive meals I've had in my time, where it really is worth saving a few bob during each month leading up to the event, it's just too much for too little.
Desserts were a damning indictment on the place. We shouldn't really have ordered them since we'd already spent rather a lot, but we hoped against hope that they could salvage the evening. We should've known better. We ordered what was billed as a 'chocolate bento box': chocolate fondant cake with green tea ice cream. It turned out to be only that, which definitely wasn't worth the £10.50 they were charging. I've had better, more interesting takes on fondant than this for much less. And I didn't care that the fondant was flourless. Similarly, the 'banana split 3000' (no, I'm not making this up) sounded lovely, but was a misjudged mixture of soupy, over-rich chocolate foam, too-sweet poached banana and saffron crumble you couldn't taste, served with ice cream.
Well over £100 later, the other half and I were fairly astounded. We'd spent a lot of money on an experience that was neither fulfilling nor especially enjoyable. The birthday boy had enjoyed himself which was of course the main reason for the evening. Unfortunately, the main reasons I eat out are to enjoy myself and to sample amazing food. Nobu was so far from these that I can't envisage myself ever going back.
Nobu
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