Luna Omakase: Hidden in Los Mochis is a cosmic sushi counter
Rooftop restaurant and bar Los Mochis opened its Liverpool Street outpost last year to much fanfare. A bold, buzzing mash-up of Mexican and Japanese cuisine, it’s a maximalist playground for City types, proof that the Square Mile has outgrown its reputation for being stuffy and traditional. Head there on a Thursday evening and you’ll be lucky to find a space from which to swig your extravagant, oversized cocktail.
But located down a black stone corridor lies somewhere close to the antithesis of all this noise and colour: a calm, thoughtful space somewhere between a private dining room and a restaurant-within-a-restaurant. Luna Omakase is, as the name suggests, a Japanese omakase joint, a concept now fairly well established in London, where a theatrical and often outré tasting menu is prepared and served from behind a counter.
The attention to detail is apparent as soon as you enter through the sliding doors: calligraphy name cards perch beside immaculate (and clearly very expensive) stoneware crockery, guiding you to your seat for the evening.
Not choosing where you sit is only the beginning of an evening where choice is all but eradicated. You can opt for a wine or sake pairing but after that you’re entirely in the hands of chef Leonard Tanyag, who will instruct you on everything from which flavours to be on the lookout for to how many bites it should take to eat each course. Most of the sushi should be eaten “upside down”, for instance, so you get the full flavour from the fish.
“The moon affects us,” says Tanyag sagely as we take our seats around the counter. “Luna”, it turns out, is not just branding: the moon is more of a spiritual sommelier, with Tanyag’s ever-changing menu said to reflect the current state of the celestial bodies.
My meal took place during a waning gibbous moon, which Tanyag says tends to make one feel tired, so his menu that day was selected to be bold and invigorating. It’s hard to say how seriously he takes all the moon stuff but he certainly commits to the bit, peppering the evening with lunar-based trivia. “Did you know a full moon is the best time for fermentation?” he might ask. “Because of changes in the magnetic field.”
Pirouetting around each other like ballerinas in chef whites, those on kitchen duty churn out perfect course after perfect course, every slice and chop and prod practiced and exact. There’s buttery amberjack and delicate king crab (“did you know king crabs shed their shells every full moon?”) and decadent Hokkaido scallops and tuna tartare made from the prized otoro cut, the fattiest, most marbled part of the fish.
And there’s theatre! A tin of caviar – sitting on wasabi aged for three years until it mellows into sweetness – arrives in a kind of stone egg spewing dry ice. Sea trout is seared using a blowtorch big enough to be classified as a flame thrower. Sea bream is cooked using blocks of charcoal heated to exactly 370 degrees. Later there are little sandwiches of wagyu cooked on hot salt that taste like the best burger you’ve ever eaten.
Throughout the meal Tanyag offers insights into the courses. The onigiri, for instance, is inspired by his favourite childhood snack, which he would buy from the 7-Eleven: it’s creamy and spicy and has an aftertaste reminiscent of smoking a Marlboro Red.
It’s all so exactingly planned that despite having already consumed – by my count – 12 courses, a pair of desserts (blood orange camomile granita and a soufflé of miso caramel with wasabi ice cream) slip down perfectly. You end the evening at the optimum level of fullness, sated but comfortable, ready to depart but not requiring a winch to extract you from your seat.
This newspaper has embarked upon a mission to find the best restaurant in the City: Luna Omakase is surely in the running.