Itto

The pair of oriental beckoning cats on a shelf, who greet customers with a smile and a wave, are one of the few giveaways as to this local eaterie's cuisine. You certainly wouldn't pick it from the otherwise nondescript and coldly modern interior - wooden floor, plain walls, bare wooden tables. Still, the sweet and friendly service warms the place up. The overly long menu trips across Japan, Thailand, China and Vietnam, picking up mostly obvious choices along the way. It's ideal if, say, you fancy a Thai and your partner has a yen for Japanese. The chilli squid was decent enough, but the batter was too thick for such a delicate meat. Vietnamese peanut salad was much better: sweet and sour and crunchy. Skewers of yakitori chicken were full of tare (Japanese barbecue sauce) flavour. Main courses of soup noodles would easily have been enough for us: the chicken pho was intense and smooth, and the bowl of spring duck and roast pork noodle soup (real comfort food, with moist meat and flavoursome stock) defeated us. Disappointingly, given the reasonable price of
the menu as a whole, the portion of edamame
was rather small for its hefty £3.50 price tag.