Akari: Essex road Japanese. Shayan's review

I love Japanese food. The sushi element of having raw fish makes it seem so fresh. As well as this the flavours of cool sauces that accompany cooked dishes continue the fresh light taste. Reading that back, I have no idea what it means.

Okay, Akari: from the outside this looks like a local pub on the corner of Essex road. I have walked past it numerous times and thought it was a pub which also served some Japanese food. A colleague of mine had mentioned that she really liked it, so I said to Laura I would meet her after work and off she went to Akari. It feels strange inside and is still feels like a pub but the menu and food looked exciting. The sushi we ordered was some of our usual tried and tested; salmon prawn tempura roll and a soft shell crab roll. These two as pictured below were really lovely. The warmth of the prawn tempura gave an extra element to the salmon roll and the soft shell crab was a mouthful and very nice.

http://www.akarilondon.co.uk/

The extra surprise which we went for (new place, new food) was a mackerel nigiri which was different. I'm not sure i would have it again but it was a nice addition.

The sushi acted as the started and for mains we had seared tuna and marinated cod in miso. These two were really nice and as you can see from the above picture looked extremely different. The cod was very simple but so delightful, with a buttery taste and the cod just flaked off and melted in my mouth- oh yeah!

The tuna itself was seared well and with the sauce gave it an extra punch. At times I thought it was a bit much but it did help to liven the dish up. We didn't order too much but I was full and very happy after this visit. Laura and I agreed that we will definitely go back and try some new dishes. We now know it does what we like well so next time we can be a bit more experimental. With regards to the service here, it was nice but it seemed like the staff were bored and were ready to pounce at any moment there was almost an empty plate. At one stage Laura was about to grab some ginger off the plate when the waitress came and tried to take the plate away. You want to feel relaxed at a restaurant and not have someone hovering over every second. A relaxed approach would be a lot better, hopefully that will be improved on next time.