I had an amazing lunch this weekend with Nuffnang at Sushinoen. The people were great and the afternoon was superb. I couldn’t complain about the amount of food that I was plied with in the slightest.
On the suggestion of Emma (Bloomzy) we started with plum wine. I’d never tried it before, and was pleasantly surprised. It’s very sweet, like a dessert wine. Basically it tastes like candy, but luckily not in a moreish way. It’s so sweet that it would be hard to drink a lot quickly.
We then moved on to more appetisers than I could ever have dreamed of. First was the butakakuni, which is a braised pork belly in soy sauce with yellow mustard. It was so rich and it was so soft that it almost dissolved in my mouth. I could have eaten a dozen portions. Next was the agedashi tofu, a fried tofu in a sauce with radish and ginger. Out of everything I tried I probably ate the most of the fried tofu. It soaked up so much flavour and was so wonderfully salty. Basically, everything that I love about halloumi. Then there was shumai, a Japanese style dim sum with prawn. Then came both a white tuna carpaccio and beef tataki. The beef tataki was very similar to a beef carpaccio. (Which I tend to like.) Then there was chicken gyoza. I almost always love chicken gyoza and this one was as delicious as the next, though nothing mind-glowingly special.
Then we had a break in the onslaught for food that was filled with groans of fullness, and protests (in vain) that we couldn’t handle any more. But all that protesting disappeared when the next round of food came out. A mixed tempura and beautiful platefuls of sushi. There was seared tuna & salmon on California roll and a prawn tempura on California roll. The tempura was a mixed tempura and I stuck to all the veggies: sweet potato, carrot, potato. They were very lightly battered, and exceedingly delicious. The only qualm that I had about the tempura was that the batter had the tendency to to slide off when dipped in the sauce.
The next course was a hot pot, but by this point in time we had been at lunch for several hours and multiple people needed to head off so we collectively decided to skip this course and head straight to dessert: matcha and mochi icecreams. Now, this might be very untrendy of me, but I don’t love matcha flavoured things. Mochi, however, I can definitely get on board with!
Many thanks to the lovely Jesse for putting the lunch together! I highly recommend Sushinoen, it was a great place for lunch though I’d suggested arriving a bit earlier than you might usually plan for on the weekends, the place was packed around 1:30pm.
SushinoEn is located at 2 White Church Lane, E1 7QR
My meal was complimentary but all opinions are, as always, my own.
