Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

A new stocking-filler book called 'Lost in Translation' has collated the unfortunate slips that can happen to phrases when they are translated into English. The chapter on menus contains some of the best: 'Dumping Soup' (Canberra); 'toes with Butter and jam' (Bali); even 'Ho-made Chilli' (Kansas City).

But you don't need to travel outside London to experience mutant English. Searching Japanese websites for new openings that might be worth a review, I resort to search engine translations to get the drift and get the following garbled description of Nagomi. 'There is a bar counter on the underground of NAGOMI and with your light knob the raw beer (ASAHI), the Japanese sake, can enjoy the low-class distilled spirits and the wine etc. Such a time, it will try trying the NAGOMI roll in the knob.' As you can see, automated translation programs have their limitations.

Reading between the lines, Nagomi sounded as if it might be a proper Japanese izakaya (pub), ripe for a visit from Time Out. There's no real equivalent of a British pub in Japan, but an izakaya is as close as it gets; a relaxed bar where the lager, shochu, saké and whisky flow, and there are relays of snacks to mop up the drink. London has a few izakaya-style diners, but spanking-new Nagomi, just off Oxford Street, is surely the smartest. Although it's superficially like a sleek, modern Japanese café, the menu reads just like a dive bar in Roppongi (Tokyo's seedy nightlife district). There are fried dishes aplenty, grilled fish, even takoyaki - six little balls of batter fried in an iron mould, filled with chunks of ocotopus and topped with whisps of bonito flakes curling in the heat. Grilled pork skin with ponzu is another dish suited to drinking sessions, the skin crisp but layered with fat beneath, like bonsai bacon. We were pleasantly surprised by most of the dishes, as izakaya cooking is rarely the finest. Deep-fried seasoned aubergine was a triumph, subtly flavoured and slithery. But the last two dishes we ordered were poor. Seaweed salad had been heaped on some Western-style bitter salad leaves, and the result was a clash of flavours as well as cultures. And for six pieces of mediocre seafood tempura we were charged a disgraceful £12.90. Natto, tuna and avocado from the daily specials list was a much superior dish, and less than half that price.

The only lager is Asahi, but there's a decent selection of sakés and shochus (Japanese vodkas) that our fellow diners were making headway with. In the basement is another bar, plus two low-ceilinged rooms with floor seating built below the pavement arches - ideal for rowdier groups of Japanese. Nagomi's fun, and different. Next time, we might even 'enjoy the low-class distilled spirits' ourselves.

Time Out London Issue 1890: November 8-15 2006