It is a blind date. The restaurant is dimly lit and quiet. The food could not be more romantic. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it's a damp Tuesday lunchtime, we are the only people in the place and it is, frankly, a little bit bonkers.
Sushi des Artistes, in London's South Kensington, looks like a jaunty Mediterranean piano bar (indeed, its other branch is in Marbella) but is in fact Japanese cuisine. Yet, from the outside, if we hadn't already pored over the website (sushidesartistes.com – trust me, it's worth it), the only reason we wouldn't be confused by the offbeat red-and-blue striped theme is that the awning screams "Japanese restaurant". Well, OK then.
At the start of the lunch, Hugh and I know that we share an appetite for food, so this is a date borne of greed rather than lust. (We've been Twitter buddies up until now.) By the end of lunch, having eaten salmon from a Martini glass, drunk sake out of a box and been splattered by a deep-fried shrimp wrapped in crispy noodles dropping into soy sauce, we stagger out of SDA like two survivors from a disaster movie, not a romcom.
But even if we never meet again, we'll always have Sloane Avenue. Looking at the bill later, we happen to have chosen dishes that sound like a relationship in microcosm. We eat from a menu where every dish has a ludicrously romantic name: Je t'aime, You Are Sensational, Love Never Dies and Just One More. What this has to do with raw fish is anyone's guess. (And it's a million miles from the mouthwatering Japanese snacks that Bill Granger details on the previous pages.)
Sushi des Artistes makes much of its artistry. No dish comes out unadorned by flowers, fruit, blobs, dashes, draping. Every plate is undeniably pretty (even if the salmon arranged over a Martini glass in the You Are Sensational sashimi combination looks a little tired and less than sensational, the rest of it – toro, hamachi – is gleaming and soft). Slow-grilled lamb with fresh chilli and miso is rich and moreish, the meat showing signs of proper marination.
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk
It is a blind date. The restaurant is dimly lit and quiet. The food could not be more romantic. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it's a damp Tuesday lunchtime, we are the only people in the place and it is, frankly, a little bit bonkers.
Sushi des Artistes, in London's South Kensington, looks like a jaunty Mediterranean piano bar (indeed, its other branch is in Marbella) but is in fact Japanese cuisine. Yet, from the outside, if we hadn't already pored over the website (sushidesartistes.com – trust me, it's worth it), the only reason we wouldn't be confused by the offbeat red-and-blue striped theme is that the awning screams "Japanese restaurant". Well, OK then.
At the start of the lunch, Hugh and I know that we share an appetite for food, so this is a date borne of greed rather than lust. (We've been Twitter buddies up until now.) By the end of lunch, having eaten salmon from a Martini glass, drunk sake out of a box and been splattered by a deep-fried shrimp wrapped in crispy noodles dropping into soy sauce, we stagger out of SDA like two survivors from a disaster movie, not a romcom.
But even if we never meet again, we'll always have Sloane Avenue. Looking at the bill later, we happen to have chosen dishes that sound like a relationship in microcosm. We eat from a menu where every dish has a ludicrously romantic name: Je t'aime, You Are Sensational, Love Never Dies and Just One More. What this has to do with raw fish is anyone's guess. (And it's a million miles from the mouthwatering Japanese snacks that Bill Granger details on the previous pages.)
Sushi des Artistes makes much of its artistry. No dish comes out unadorned by flowers, fruit, blobs, dashes, draping. Every plate is undeniably pretty (even if the salmon arranged over a Martini glass in the You Are Sensational sashimi combination looks a little tired and less than sensational, the rest of it – toro, hamachi – is gleaming and soft). Slow-grilled lamb with fresh chilli and miso is rich and moreish, the meat showing signs of proper marination.
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk
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