Bincho Yakitori, Oxo Tower, Barge House Street, London SE1(020 7803 0858).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £65.
With some restaurants it is reasonable to ask a simple question: in a city lousy with possibilities, what is its purpose? This question is all the more pointed for Bincho Yakitori, which occupies a site that has had almost as many occupants as Rod Stewart's marital bed. I have reviewed here three times since first slipping my once slender buttocks into the reviewer's seat, and I wasn't at all surprised when the previous two restaurants - River Walk, and before that Neat London - went tits up.
In theory, the second floor of London's Oxo Tower is a fantastic site. It appears to float over the Thames, and offers the second-best view of St Paul's Cathedral in London. The problem is that the very best view of St Paul's is six floors above at the Oxo Tower restaurant, which gets few awards for its food, but is widely regarded as having one of the best locations in the capital.
In short, if you bother to come to the Oxo Tower to eat, you need a damn good reason to get out of the lift at floor two rather than floor eight, and so far no restaurant has provided that. Bincho Yakitori, a Japanese joint that serves food on sticks, may finally have found the right proposition. This is not because it is markedly better than what goes on six floors above, but it is markedly different.
The menu is made up of myriad tiny dishes of skewered, marinated and grilled ingredients, cheerfully priced from a mere £1.20 for chicken through to a wallet-crunching, er, £2.60 for beef. There are also some salads, as well as a few slightly larger-sized grilled dishes, but for the most part it's stuff on sticks.
You will know by now that I am not a slavering devotee of authenticity. Repeat after me: authentic is not the same as good. That said, I was in Tokyo earlier this year and many of the things I came to love there are represented here. Partly, it's about the simplicity of the dark wood decor and the open kitchen at the back, where serious Japanese men in black turn their fiddly morsels over the belch of smoke and flame. It also has that classic Japanese touch, the counter where you can sit and watch the kitchen at work. But mostly it's about the food. It is about taking individual ingredients and showing them to their best advantage. It is about flavour and taste over volume, and it's about a meal of many nimble dishes, over a few carb-stuffed heavyweights.
This, I have to tell you, is my opinion and not that of my three companions, who are all high maintenance. They whined about being lost in the meal's structure, about having to reorder - you will need around 10 of the tiny dishes each - about a lack of starches (until I directed them to the list of rice dishes). May I point out that none of them has been asked to write a restaurant column in a national newspaper, so you can safely ignore their views. I didn't invite them for their opinions, only their bodies. Their presence meant I could try more stuff.
Bincho Yakitori works if you treat it as a place for a casual meal and if you order the right things. For example, do not order the shitake mushrooms, which are dull and flavourless, or the asparagus, which has no business being on a menu this late in the season. Do not bother with the squid, which came off the grill dull and rubbery, or with the tiger prawns, which were dry and salty.
Instead, try sweet lumps of quail, or chicken and spring onion. Do not miss the cubes of pork belly, which clearly had been long-braised before being grilled, so that the skewer was the only thing keeping the layers together. Make sure to order the sea bream, which has a fresh oiliness to it, and the beef rib, which is remarkably tender.
My companions, who are lightweights, were not taken by the richness of the unagi - Japanese eel - but I thought it was as close to the real thing as you are likely to find in this country. I also liked the curls of freshly crisped chicken skin, a dish that's widely available in the yakitori joints of Tokyo, but rarely eaten here. True, the salty-sweet soy-based flavour profile of every dish is very similar. But then again, it happens to be a flavour I like.
We enjoyed the mizuna leaf salad, and a larger plate of salmon teriyaki, with perfectly rendered skin. Solid rice cakes, glazed with soy and wrapped in sheets of toasted seaweed, divided my party, though we all liked the buttered rice with garlic, which achieved its effect through a big hit of sesame oil. Desserts - rubbery pannacotta, boring layered banana cake - were not worth the wait or the price. Go somewhere else for ice cream. Drink beer or sake (but not wine), get a table by the window, order carefully and Bincho Yakitori's reason for existing may well become clear. Hell, this restaurant might even survive.
