Shiro restaurant on Broadgate Circle is for sushi done properly
Finally, sushi that isn’t pretentious, high street or needlessly expensive, finds Adam Bloodworth
Finally, new Broadgate Circle opening Shiro is somewhere to explore sushi as a culinary passion. Sushi is hard to get into in London. In West London it is sold for extortionate prices and dressed up in all sorts of fancy ways in restaurants that turn into nightclubs, and on the high street it is fine if uninspiring when sold in little cardboard packets.
In London it is hard to enjoy sushi like the Japanese do, where the raw fish is plentiful and accessible at all price points, arriving in chunks that are twice, three times the size of UK portions. Anyway, the Shiro restaurant now open on Broadgate Circle is helping change that image. It is a bright, energetic restaurant that has a backdrop of swanky white furnishings with a particularly fancy ceiling art piece. It would suit a casual dinner date or something more formal. It feels properly swanky, but the type of swanky that lets the sushi be star of the show.
Plates are bountiful, each displaying their own assortment of bright colours. Radishes, petals and exotic plant leaves are the supporting characters to the fish. Fresh not fussy and pristinely decorated, dishes arrive like dainty pieces of contemporary art. We began with a spicy tuna and salmon tartar and a Kabocha pumpkin gyoza, an intriguing partner dish to the delicious fat of the fish. The hero Shiro sushi platter was filling in ways I never knew sushi could be. It was a triumphant collection of 12 pieces decorated with mushrooms, caviar and all sorts of pretty green foliage that could have come from the deep sea.
To our left some distinguished-looking Japanese men were carving slices of fish and looking as if their lives depended on it, the neat little portions of white and pink-shaded flesh laying in waiting behind glass. It’s not all ocean-dwelling: we ventured into the robata Japanese barbecue-style region of the Dinner menu for some Australian Wagyu steak turned Asian with the arrival of arima sansho and braised daikon. It was a thing of beauty.
Did I mention the cocktails? We had primers of plum and ginger margaritas to slap the day’s flavours out of our mouths and bring our taste buds to freshness. Later, a Lagrimas rose was a boisterous partner to the fish.
Broadgate Circle is an odd thoroughfare of a place that, let’s be frank, lacks cohesion in the way those commercial restaurant hubs tend to. Mr Fogg’s, The Botanist and Comptoir Lebanais are some of the restaurants you can find here, but also everywhere else in London. Often, tables and gathering spaces here are full with post-work drinkers, and things can feel a little chaotic. Shiro isn’t part of that. On the higher level and slightly off to one side, it is far removed enough from the rest of the Broadgate Circle establishments to keep the drunken masses away, yet still close enough to make this a decent and practical meeting point for a post-work dinner.
Trust the staff to lead you through the menu, as they know best, but if you’re wanting a proper taste of the best the restaurant has to offer, book for one of their new Shiro Nights series. There, you’ll get a tour through Edamame and Miso soup starters, tempura and gyoza and sushi with free-flowing wine for under fifty per head. Forget Itsu’s half price offers: that’s a sushi bargain I’m willing to get on board with.
To book a table visit shirosushi.co.uk; email [email protected]