Winter has well and truly arrived. As I write this on a bitterly cold Friday morning, there is but a shallow layer of snow building outside, not quite enough for me to stab my feet into it with heavy boots, but enough for me to feel Christmassy. I’m usually averse to boiling hot and soupy things (my tongue bruises very easily with heat), but my numbing senses needed some thawing, and what better way to do so, than to snuggle up next to my special half and dip our heads into a pot of boiling water. Blub, blub.
Mitsukoshi is a Japanese department store – a huge one – and it’s origins can be traced as far back as the 17th century. Talk about staying power. It has a small outpost right here in Piccadilly Circus. It’s small inside, and personally I find the space just a tad claustrophobic. I’ve always found it abit puzzling as to why Japanese tourist choose to shop in a Japanese store when they could splash their cash on more ‘local’ goods and services which otherwise cannot be found in their homeland. I’m convinced there’s a good reason for it.
Anyway, in the basement lies Mitsukoshi restaurant, which I didn’t know about until I was taken there – what a surprise, and I thought I knew my Japanese restaurants in London. The space really feels like Asia, or more accurately, it felt like I had just boarded Singapore Airlines. Red carpets, red wooden tables, elevator music…, I mean lift music. It was like watching a US hit TV show in which the main characters had to fly to an exotic location, like say Hong Kong. As the audience, you play along with it, and the producers make the setting look believable enough, but not enough to convince you that its actually on foreign soil. You thinking about the same show as me? Yuppers, I’m thinking about the midseason Flash Forward cliffclanger which went down in ‘Hong Kong’. (Wedeck’s killer filofax that murdered his 40″ LCD was pretty hilarious with a ninja throw.) Oh how I do digress.
We kicked off proceedings with a fresh sashimi salad, finished with a spicy sauce.
Oily, odourless, smooth and silky – the fish were all fresh, and the spicy tangy wasabi drizzle complimented this salad well, our palattes suitably cleanse, we could now move on to the shabu-shabu.
We were bemused when the waitress uncovered the lid on the pot – it was just boiling water – no soup base, no stock… huh? We didn’t find out till after the meal, that this is how proper shabu-shabu is meant to be presented. Boiling water, sukiyaki beef (very thinly sliced) and vegetables, which in this case included tofu and enoki mushrooms. Each of us also had two personal bowls of dipping sauce – one was a citrusy soya sauce, and the other was a sort of thick sesame sauce. I googled this and my findings led me to believe that the shabu-shabu is a variation of the Nabemono (Nabe – “Cooking Pot” Mono – “things”) , which is similar (in spirit) to the steamboat, or the hotpot in other cuisines. As I am intimately connected to Taiwan; the Taiwanese version is also served along side personal bowls of dipping sauce but instead it is made with a spicy sauce known as shacha sauce and also with raw egg – a stellar combo if you should ever try it. (The raw egg yolk is the secret to the dipping sauce)
Anyway, I’m used to dipping my sukiyaki into flavoured soup bases instead of just plain hot water, so I ate this meal mostly feeling as if something was missing. The sesame dip while good, wasn’t quite as satisfying as the shacha+raw egg combo that I had been exposed to either. So the shabu-shabu (which literally means swish swish) was abit wishy washy for me, at best – too plain.
We also ordered two sushi rolls – one was unagi with avocado and the other was a spider roll, which was crisply fried soft shell crab – both of which went down well. After wolfing down the meat and veges; udon was brought to our table and we ended our meal slurping (at least I did, where are my table manners, eh) noodles into the night… The restaurant was filled with Japanese families and what appeared to be silver haired exec types in jeans enjoying a quiet one away from the family. As I left the restaurant, I also stole a peek into the sushi bar, to which I noticed a Japanese dude in a suit (probably after work) entertaining a lady (also) in a suit (also probably after work) tucking away nigiri and a couple of cans of Kirin. Atmospheric, I’m convinced I was transported to Japan for just that fleeting moment in time.
More photographs from the meal on my flickr account here.
The Gist of It
Mitsukoshi Restaurant official site
14-20 Lower Regent Street SW1Y 4PH
Tel : 020 7930 0317
Tube: Piccadilly Circus
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Tags: Japanese, london, Mitsukoshi, piccadilly circus, shabu-shabu
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To be honest, I’m surprised that the place isn’t filled up during lunches. I mean, the food is real decent and the price is reasonable.
When we were there, we ordered the kids’ bento to go with our mains. I have a weakness for omu-rice, which only kids’ bento offers. Didn’t get a chance to try out the shabu shabu though.
I supposed you didn’t drop by the newly furnished Japan Centre beside it?
C K
during lunch hour on weekdays they set up a little stall outside the restaurant selling bento boxes; their lunches seem to be much nicer than the japan centre toku and at around the same price range but not that many people seem to know about it?
was the beef flavourful though? I tend to do shabu shabu at home because it really is just filtered water in a hotpot, but if the meat is of good quality then the whole experience shouldn’t be bland?
Your review and photos transported me back to Tokyo! When I was there in April, I really enjoyed the food in the basement of their department stores. While I never saw shabu-shabu, there was plenty of great food like okanomiyaki. Now that’s something to write home about!
I had shabu-shabu at Mitsukoshi and found it to be bland as well. But my experience, still with boiling water and beef, in Tokyo was completely different. So delicious!
unagi and avocado, my fave sushi roll in the whole world. sorry the shabu shabu was bland. the only way to have noodles is to slurp them, no? happy hols to you and yours. x
oh WOW I didn’t know there’s a restaurant at Mitsukoshi either! How bizarre! I’d heard people ate there but I thought it was a casual cafeteria style (ie not worth going to) thing, but look at that, a proper sit down meal, sashimi, shabu shabu and all. Sounds traditional but not mind blowing. Maybe one day when I’m stuck at Piccadilly Circus and desperately craving Japanese.
London Chow – Not yet, still waiting for the weather to recover before heading out to the new JC. I will give the Mitsukoshi another try again, this time for the other things on their menu.
Holly/Tommy – I think it’s because I’m used to flavoured soup bases, so for me, just cooking meat in hot water was indeed very bland. I read somewhere that in Japan they use Wagyu beef instead. On the otherhand, this was really my first time ever eating proper shabu-shabu so I dont really have a reference point. I would love to try the real thing in Japan though for benchmarking purposes.
Sabrina – Tokyo! Nice.. I’d like to go there soon enough, up till now, I’ve only had Japanese food outside of the home country. I’ve never really had ‘real’ Japanese food before, so would be interesting to see the differences.
Shayma – Indeed to slurp them and sometimes out loud too depending where you are, happy holidays too
Catty – …and when you are desperately craving it..
Great review! Except (and this is totally off-topic), the FlashForward ‘Hong Kong’ setting was comically bad. Things started off okay, but the producers obviously thought they should model the ‘real’ HK on their local Chinatown. The pagoda and the rickshaw? The elderly man in the pointed hat? Bad on an EPIC scale!
[...] The former is the namesake restaurant belonging to a premier name in the Japanese department store business and is located in the basement of the operations in Piccadilly Circus. Matsuri on the other hand, is a premier brand in the world of Japanese dining and is known for its Teppanyaki. Both represent – in my view – the old guard of premier Japanese restaurant in London and because of that, it means your bill is likely to balloon if you want a complete experience at either restaurant. Stil worth a mention, I believe, but it’s way, way down the list of priorities. Read more [...]