Chris D’Sylva has been taking over Notting Hill, one food business at a time, since 2019: first with Smart Grocers, the Fish + Meat Shop and Supermarket of Dreams, then with Dorian Bistro and Eel Sushi. At Nakimushi, he’s stuck to Japanese but dropped the sushi and entrusted the £2m townhouse conversion to the two chefs running the place. Robin Kosuge and Yuji Shimokawa Kelly made a name for themselves with the Robin’s Ramen and Urchin residencies respectively and now share a permanent home at Nakimushi, just off Notting Hill Gate, with ramen at street level and a wider-ranging Japanese menu upstairs.
Wallpaper* dines at Nakimushi, London
The mood: Tokyo in a Kensington terrace
Jack Architecture & Design, the London practice founded in 2020 by Jonathan Richardson, has combined a spare Japanese sensibility with British heritage details. The original brick façade survives, with the shopfront painted oxblood and a noren curtain hung above the door. The deep red carries through all three floors in hand-glazed Kit Kat tiles and the leather banquettes lining the walls. Everywhere else is brushed pine, with parquet underfoot and brass around the edges: check out the clever little table lamps which can be unscrewed and repositioned.
‘It’s much more enjoyable to eat in a warm environment, because the food looks better’
Shimokawa Kelly
‘We wanted to move away from the identity of sushi restaurants,’ explains Shimokawa Kelly. ‘The hinoki you get in most of them has a very cold feeling to it. It’s much more enjoyable to eat in a warm environment, because the food looks better – and so do the guests and the staff.’
The open kitchen takes up half the ground floor, kitted out with a built-to-order grill to handle proper robata. A men bako – the box a ramen shop keeps its noodles in – has been made by a friend of Kosuge’s, carrying his Japanese nickname where the noodle factory’s name would usually go.
The other half is occupied by a central communal table and more seats by the window; upstairs is the calmer 25-seat dining room and a tiled bar. Look out for the glass-walled cold room by the stairs to the loos, where whole ducks and Ibérico Duroc pork are hung to age.
The food: Ramen and then some
Downstairs is designed for in-and-out quick eats of ramen such as Kosuge's signature chashu pork belly bowl, a Basque chicken broth with noodles cut to his own wheat-and-rye specification by Komugi Noodles in Manchester, and a ramen egg steeped in Yorkshire Tea and soy.
Upstairs is meant for a more leisurely exploration of a menu that, like Kosuge and Yuji Shimokawa Kelly, is half Japanese, half London. Corn tempura arrives wrapped in a crackling sheet of nori and dusted with salt made from fig leaves foraged a few streets away. There is quail tempura with apricot purée and a jerk-spiked tendashi dipping sauce, and a taco – ‘tako’ being Japanese for ‘octopus’ – whose buckwheat shell is enriched with fat left over from rendering the ramen’s chicken, the octopus brined and grilled under red pepper and plum. And you can order ramen up here, too.
The karaage tastes like the best chicken nugget in west London
Ben McCormack
It’s serious Japanese food for people who don’t take what they eat too seriously – the karaage tastes like the best chicken nugget in west London – but do care about the deliciousness of what they put in their mouth, whether that’s a luscious grilled Ibérico pork loin with an umami kiss of red almond miso, or a glass of aged junmai saké brewed to a recipe from 1703.
Nakimushi is located at 7 Kensington Mall, London W8 4EB, United Kingdom