Zuma's food remains tops, but the atmosphere makes me wish for take-away

More than three years ago I wrote about Zuma as the best Japanese restaurant I'd experienced, and swore I'd make an effort to go back.  It took a while.  Mostly because it's one of those perpetually sold out places that requires you to call exactly 3 months before you want to dine there to snag a reservation.    If you fail to call within two hours of the tables being released, you miss your window.

Wrapping up a rare visit from my father, and getting him together with the NU girls, seemed like a good excuse.  Thus I marked my diary and booked the table in October. While others were tucking into austerity January, we had one more celebration on the cards.

Was it as good as I remembered?  Absolutely.  It was also far, far more expensive than I recalled.  And the uber-glamorous dinner crowd with their cacophonous buzz left me disenchanted.  I'd return for lunch … which draws more of a business crowd … but probably not dinner.

We pushed the boat out and had the more expensive of the two tasting menus.  This was actually a failure of communication between my husband and myself; I was steering towards the less expensive, but he somehow mis-interpreted that and ordered the luxury level for the table.  Something I didn't realise until the grilled lobster game out.  What the hell.  Who needs to buy groceries in January, anyway?  We'll just work through the Christmas leftovers.

As with my last visit, everything was perfection.  Standouts were that lobster, soft shell crab and the wagyu beef.  The latter turned up cured, cold and very rare in one course, grilled and in a sweet and savoury sauce in another.  Everything was magnificent, from dishes of salmon tartare to platters of succulent sashimi to sushi like little works of art to morsels of perfectly steamed, melt-in-your-mouth black cod.  This is a seafood lover's dream.  Everything is exquisitely fresh and thus you're really able to pick up the distinct differences in taste between the different kinds of fish.  And we ended up, as I did last time, with a chocolate fondant that puts many French places to shame.

Everything comes as sharing platters, which is great fun when you have several people and can all compare tastes and favourites.  Unfortunately, they don't have a matching wine or sake pairing menu. Which, of course, is a good way of keeping costs from spiralling further out of control.  We had their sake sommelier bring us four different little jugs to accompany the four courses.  Three were chilled, one room temperature.  She explained some of the nuances but her English wasn't that good, so this lacked the detailed pairing explanations you'd get from an expert in an equivalent European restaurant.  It was interesting, and the match with the sushi course was particularly good.  But our biggest lesson was that sake, at more than £30 for each of those cute little jugs, makes fine wine look like a value-for-money drink.  Given that the majority of the meal was fish, we would have had a better time getting a single, seafood-friendly white to share.  Live and learn.

My biggest issue with Zuma on this occasion was my fellow diners.  I can't think of another London

restaurant that is so flagrantly, ostentatiously set up for the Super Rich.  Tables of Arabic oil princes jockeyed with Russian oligarchs and their pneumatically enhanced, diamond-draped women.  Asian beauties with piles of shopping bags from nearby luxury brands sat cheek-by-jowl with the rare table of English aristo trust fund babies.  Rare, because Asian, Arabic and Oriental diners outnumbered Anglo-Saxons by two to one.  Couture clothing dominated, as did youth.  As upper middle class professionals with an average age in the mid 50s, we were no doubt amongst the poorest and oldest in the room.  Zuma presented fascinating people watching possibilities, and I'm sure that atmosphere is part of what you pay for.  Problem is, I don't want to pay for that.  I just want London's best Japanese food.

One other small quibble:  With tables so difficult to get, this is one of those places that gives you just two hours for your booking.  Which is fine if you're doing a normal three-course meal, but actually gets quite insulting when you're splashing out on the budget-busting tasting menu with break-the-bank sake rounds.  Eventually, they figured this out, and slowed down to let us take our time after the third round of food (Triggered, no doubt, by the premature delivery of the black cod at the same time as the sushi.  The manager whisked it away in embarrassment and delivered another, later.  It deserves, and later got, solo centre stage.)

So Zuma leaves me with mixed feelings.  It stands head and shoulders above any other Japanese food I've ever had.  I could eat here every day.  The food is exquisite in every way and I'd prefer it not just to every other Japanese place, but to most other restaurants in town.  But the atmosphere is an exclusive, showy, loud morality play of conspicuous consumption, rushed along by waiters who clearly want to turn your table.

For the same price, and the same effort to make the advance booking, you could be sitting in the quiet elegance of Le Gavroche.  Which makes you think.

In fact, that's where we're off to next.