Buzz Bar (refurbished)
Location: Swinegate
Featuring: Sushi, Tempura, Katsu
Rating: * * * *
Tokyo, you may not know, is now the world’s haute cuisine capital. Its restaurants have 191 Michelin stars between them compared to Paris’s 97 and New York’s 54.
These are not hollow statistics. Japanese food is imaginative, sophisticated and steeped in tradition - Buzz Bar comes highly recommended from the F&D pulpit (see website for full-length review).
The tempura and katsu dishes are very approachable: the former involves a selection of vegetables and fruits de la mer fried in batter; the latter is a preparation of deep-fried meat - usually pork, sometimes chicken - coated in breadcrumbs.
Less accessible for some is the sushi, and more terrifying still are some of its not-so-conventional incarnations: octopus, eel, salmon roe… You’ll hear people complain that it’s raw fish, that’s it’s ‘weird’. Tell them to get over it - it’s food.
