Randomness Guide to London Menu

Japanese restaurant just off Piccadilly, down a side alley (Piccadilly Place) a little to the west of Le Meridean Hotel.

It's quite small, with just ten seats at the ground-floor sushi bar and another 35 or so upstairs, so it's worth booking at weekends. The ground floor also houses a takeaway counter, with pre-prepared clingwrapped polystyrene trays of sushi and sashimi. (They have another takeaway-only site, Delicatessen Yoshino, at 59 Shaftesbury Avenue, W1D 6LF).

The interweb seems torn between labelling this place "good value" and labelling it "expensive". It's sort of both; the prices aren't cheap, but the quality is high. The Yoshino zen yuki set menu is perhaps the best bargain, priced at less than a tenner as of March 2010 for a main dish (e.g. fried mackerel) plus tuna carpaccio, tuna roll, seaweed salad, sesame green beans, carrot and potato salad, and pickles.

Kake visited on a Wednesday lunchtime in March 2010. When I arrived around 1:30pm, there were three customers already sitting at the sushi bar, and the upstairs sounded quite busy. I was offered a choice of where to sit, and chose the sushi bar for a bit more peace and quiet.

I was tempted by the yuki set menu but decided to splash out on the Yoshino chirashi (£19.80) photo. This wasn't what I would normally expect of chirashi (a bowl of rice with raw fish etc arranged on top), but rather a nicely presented three-tier bento box containing two starters along with a portion of rice scattered with finely-shredded nori, snow peas, and some kind of leaf vegetable, and finally a selection of seven types of sashimi on a bed of ice.

The starters were both interesting and tasty; one consisted of edamame beans tossed with shreds of lightly cooked white fish and goji berries, while the other was based on sweet-and-sour marinated sardines topped with shredded daikon and spring onion. The rice was well-seasoned, and there was obvious care and skill in the shredded vegetables on top. The sashimi was all fresh and well-cut.

[Flick]? has also tried out Yoshino, in Autumn 2006. The menus were terrifying; I'm not sure if it's a traditional way of doing it, but rather than a list of food items they had a series of diagrams showing a plate with (say) three sections on it, then a list of items you could have in each of those three sections. The fish was wonderful, though, as was the sake (huge range).

If you fancy a Japanese overdose, try Minamoto Kitchoan for pudding.

Kake's verdict: Liked it a lot. I'm going to come back and try the cheaper set menu.

Accessibility: Toilets and most of the seating are on the first floor, up a flight of stairs with two bends and a handrail most of the way.

See also:

• Time Out review
• Square Meal entry
• London Eating comments
• Qype comments