I would have gone just for the loo. It’s one of those devices that are ubiquitous across Japan. Pitch up at the grottiest looking sushi bar and you’ll not just have the greatest rice and raw fish of your life, but also the finest, cleanest, technologically most exciting lavatorial experience. It literally makes us look backward. Although I do appreciate that in this age of deliberate governmental decimation of hospitality it’s hard to get a single 10-grand loo nodded through by the board.
Still, there’s one there at Sushi Nakamura, just off the little dining room, in the middle of Leeds. And you can pop in there, mid-course, for a little teasing warm air and oscillation.
Indeed, it’s a chance to stretch your legs during a deliciously long dinner. I can’t normally countenance a tasting menu, but you can keep lobbing small plates of Japanese food at me ‘til the cows come home.
Sushi Nakamura is a glorious place to experience this. In Eastgate, off the grand Victorian shopping avenues of this great northern city, is a little piece of Japan. And on a wet midweek evening I had the place all to myself. The dining room is a six-seater bar, a calm environment of stone and wood with one English, Japanese-speaking, waitress and the chef.
We chatted now and then as he presented plates of divine mastication and enveloping sips of sake – I, at first, embarrassing myself with an almost racist question. It reminded me of a barman in a small hostelry on the tiny island of Leros, in Greece, who asked me where I was from. “England,” I replied. “Oh?,” his eyes lit up. “Do you know John in Manchester?”
My version was “Do you know Yoshi Ishi?” It turned out to be not such a silly question, because he did know him. And, like me, he thinks Ishi-san (formerly of Umu, in London, now back in Tokyo) is one of the greatest Japanese chefs.
Another course was placed in front of me with a “ha!” And a bow. The Japanese dining experience is crafted like a religious ceremony and, at a place like this, in a place like Leeds, all the sweeter and more wonderful.
The omakase is their enforced menu of some 20 plates and I submitted to the suggested sake drink-a-long, with a Japanese beer chaser so that this thirsty muncher could keep the tab down. Posh sake, sparkling, cold, ambient or warm, is like the caress of a soothing angel, but the tab is a brutal wake-up call, a mugging half-way through a massage.
The path of plates was beautifully constructed, a hand-held journey from seaweed to cake, each dish cut, pressed or torched and laid before you by the chef, who wielded his knife like a possessed alchemist before, occasionally, disappearing behind an orange curtain.
The most remarkable thing was the many acutely defined notes of texture. Here the secrets of ikejime are revealed – as shown by chef Ishi-san to me, first-hand on a boat off the Cornish coast. The killing of a fish by the insertion of a metal rod into the brain and spinal cord, softening its passage to heaven, and soothing the muscles. Texture is so crucial in Japanese food culture.
All of which begs for specifics. The menu starts with “small plates”, highlights being the salted seaweed that revealed a surprising nutty flavour and the boldness of “chawanmushi with whelk”. Yes, whelk in all its old harbour, do I hear seagulls, rubber. Foul on its own, here an arresting, refreshing pause, a bracing swim on a hot island hop.
Of the 12-nigiri selection, the three tuna plates were a lesson in the glorious differences between lean, fatty and fattiest, the latter bluefin, for example, being like the melting mouthful of wagyu beef.
My most enjoyable morsel from the final flurry was tuna, but radically different simply from how it was cut, and handed to me in a roll, crunchy freshness, like the most exhilarating lunch dish.
After some slices of apple, to which he brings majesty purely from his cuts, I was led to the front bar for a final bite of matcha cake and red bean jelly.
Curtail your next holiday, sell the car, sell a child, whatever it takes to afford a trip to this magical corner of the north.