Not doing terribly well at this healthy eating month - or am I? Last night we went to Itadaki Zen, 39 King's Cross Road, King's Cross, WC1X 9BJ, a vegan Japanese restaurant in London claiming to be the only such in Europe. Vegan and Japanese, got to be healthy!
Some of the food we had is shown above, I'm sorry the pictures aren't great but phone pictures taken in haste rarely are.
It's a difficult review to write. We had a lovely time, enjoyed our meal and the staff were helpful and friendly but there were disappointments in lots of small ways and it seems ungrateful somehow to list them.
I think the size of our party of nine might have flustered them a bit. We're a well established group and we've brought more than one kitchen to its knees with our greed and disparate requests.
The menu is ordered in such a way that it's difficult to put together a meal that is harmonious. It's easy to choose a couple of items for a quick lunch but for a full dinner it is a frustrating confusion. The restaurant has tried to overcome this by offering some sets. Most of the people with me chose one or other of these sets but the differences from set to set didn't really amount to much. There was too much duplication to make it feel like a real choice.
I ordered off piste and chose some maki sushi which I felt was a bit dry and lacking in sushi su, an onion pancake called jijimi which was delicious, tofu dengaku, kimchi, miso soup and a bowl of rice (which never came but we got a free pudding so nothing to bitch about). The problem was the order these arrived in, sushi, kimchi, soup, then the pancake, eventually the tofu, it was all a bit disorganised. The kitchen sent down some extra Kimbab which was also a bit dry but a nice thought, making my meal more Korean in the end than Japanese. The others who ordered individually had the same problems.
People ordering the sets fared slightly better as their 'courses' were complete. They also got a tremendous amount of food, making the cost of about £21 per head extremely good value.
Puddings aren't very varied and the only oddity, a sweet potato mochi, was so odd that it caused some hilarity but then, you don't go to a Japanese restaurant for sweets.
The staff were accommodating and brought us a little plate of natto so that the virgins (most of us) could try it. When I got past my fear of the slime I found it quite good, although at the time I described the taste as somewhere between acacia seeds and a dustbin.
The bill for nine came to about £240 to include service and a few bottles of wine. Not bad for London. Take cash if you can.
So it's hard to give marks out of 10 at this stage - we may have to go back and try again.
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