@ Tokyo Diner

Tokyo Diner, an island of Japanese cooking among the Chinese crowd of restaurants in Soho, is not the right place for being unfaithful.
Mine actually wasn’t this sort of evening out – I went there with a workmate – but I seriously advise you against going there with your lover. It’s not because of the food, but because they peep at you.
How can I say that? The day after, thinking about reviewing the restaurant, its nice vegetarian Bento box – which looks like it was amazingly just come out of a manga or one of those Japanese cartoons I used to watch when I was a child – I surfed the Internet and I found its website.
But that’s horrible! By the homepage I saw the room where we had dinner the day before. Actually, at the beginning I hadn’t realized it was a web camera 24-hours working because it was quite early in the morning and the restaurant opens only at noon. I thought it was simply a picture, albeit without the high resolution you should use to advertise your restaurant.
After surfing a bit in, I went back to the homepage and I saw the waitress who served us with one of her colleagues – both strictly Japanese like all the staff as the owner Richard Hills wants – tiding up the place before opening for lunchtime.

“Oh, my God,” I though, “it means that everybody in the world can snoop around my plate!”
Fortunately, at least, there is no sound, so web-voyeurs can’t listen to our speeches – if acceptable they can understand anything in the noise of several different languages.
To strike a blow for them now, I must say that, apart from the food that is various, traditional and first-rate, Tokyo Diner has at least other three features for deserving to go there.
Firstly, they don’t want tips. It is announced in the first page of the menu, where with samurai’s authority they wrote ‘Japanese style: we do NOT take tips. Please come again and bring your friends’.
All right, also because if you persist and leave some money on the table, they give it to St. Martin-in-the-Fields’ unit for Homeless.
For them tipping is a foreign concept and they claim that since 1992, when the restaurant has opened, tips have never been expected or accepted.
Another appreciable aspect concerns the prices, not expensive at all for a place in the heart of London, which served original Japanese food instead of fake Italian pizza or burgers: Mr Hills struggles quite a lot with visas to bring here genuine Japanese chefs and some of them are only devoted to prepare sushi.
We had our dinner, drinks and Japanese tea included, for £25 and until now it remains the cheapest place where I have eaten out in London.
Saving money seems to be a fundamental part of Tokyo Diner’s philosophy and sincerely I think it’s the best way to make business, not only during credit crunch times.
Why try to diddle customers proposing them low quality food and too high prices? The most of the people are not foolish, so you’re going to do that just once and never see them again for the rest of your business life (and I don’t think it will last long).
The third thing I would like to stress is their ecological engagement or, at least, their attempt.
Tokyo Diner’s policy starts from the idea that is possible to succeed in business without damaging the environment which means they prefer sustainable sources of supply, from energy that comes from Ecocitry, a company based in Stroud, Gloucestershire, that produces energy only from wind, hydro and other renewable producers.
Secondly, they claim they don’t buy bluefin tuna, one of the most important ingredients of raw fish cookery.
Of course this second statement has to be proven – the menu doesn’t name any dish made of it, then it is a matter of trust and maybe expert taste - and, as my friend noticed, they sell water in plastic bottles, which are not very wholesome for any kind of fish when they have been thrown out in the sea.
I’m going to remember this place even for another important fact: I had there my first meal using only chopsticks, the only ‘weapon’ available for attacking food, even because if you would try to ask for cutlery the sushi-chef would come out to see if my flesh was good enough for his task (maybe bluefin tunas are risking to die out, but not silly human beings).
My handhold looked a bit handicapped, but eventually I grabbed even the last grain of rice and fortunately nobody in the world, apart from my mate, has seen that: after the first moments of displeasure, I realised that our table was out of the camera sight.


Tokyo Diner, 2 Newport Place, Leicester Square, London WC2H 7JJ.
Tel: 020 7287 8777 Website: http://www.tokyodiner.com
Open 12 till 12, 365 days a year