To say that Korean-American chef Akira Back has been shaped by a range of madly disparate cultural forces is to put it mildly. Born in Seoul, he moved to Aspen, Colorado, when he was 14, spent most of his youth ripping it up as a professional snowboarder, perfected Japanese cuisine under the exacting tutelage of sushi master Kenichi Kanada, and opened his first restaurant amid the throbbing neon-lit whirl of Las Vegas.
You might expect some of these intriguing, highly-specific geographical influences to be apparent in Back’s much anticipated first London restaurant. However, having now eaten at Akira Back at The Mandarin Oriental Mayfair, I can confidently say that its conceptual lodestar is nothing so much as the safe, cosseting Anywheresville of international luxury culture itself.
The sprawled, 148-cover space has the taupe, stone and timber colour palette of an especially grand Apple Store. The floor staff are abundant and obliging. The food — a mixture of Japanese, Korean and high-low American fusion — is exactly the kind of thing that you can imagine slowly warming in the sunshine next to a Mykonos pool cabana.
None of this is, in and of itself, bad. Yet there was something about the cumulative impact of it all, something about its inert flavours, haphazard execution and forgettable bloodlessness, that exemplified all that is especially tedious and overly dominant in our city’s food scene. This is the 24th outpost of a global empire that’s more about pacifying high-net-worth travellers than it is about enriching a local food culture.
Five pieces of serviceable nigiri might as well have been an edible screensaver
There were no headline moments of disaster. Nonetheless, the only friend I’d recommend it to would be one I secretly hated. Let’s have it right, though. This newest Mandarin Oriental, which lurks beyond flamboyantly-liveried doormen and a soaring, futurist-Georgian facade on Hanover Square, is a staggering feat of subterranean architecture and construction.
Emerge from the fragranced gloom of the lobby and you hit a sunken, triple-height atrium. Gushing sunlight. A dramatic, sculptural swirl of a wooden installation. The sort of Ming marble spiral staircase that almost makes you want a top hat and an introductory musical number. I arrived midweek, to a sparse sprinkling of business lunchers and bored-looking hotel residents prodding truffled edamame, and think I may have gasped.
The menu gestures towards similar extravagance and AB Tuna pizza proved a compelling, if odd, start. It is a circular cracker, layered over with “umami aioli”, translucent scrims of sashimi and a haunting blast of truffle oil. Redolent, all at once, of tactile, post-Nobu glamour and the sort of thing a degenerate chef might pile onto a Ryvita after service. Miso aubergine, however, struck me as sloppily constructed: a puny boat of cross-hatched eggplant, sickly sweet on the palate and bearing a rubbery lid of melted mozzarella which flipped up and down like a bad toupée.
Two little tacos, filled with wagyu bulgogi and a striped blob of roasted tomato ponzu, were fine if forgettable. Hot mess uramaki-style rolls — a hectic, impressionistic mix of sashimi, crab, crispy tempura bits and spattered, bright orange spicy ponzu aioli — added zip but not coherence, while five pieces of serviceable nigiri might as well have been an edible screensaver.
I will say that a gochujang bibimbap donburi was highly comforting in the way that you’d hope a warm mound of rice, slathered in spicy ketchup, would be. But the kicker here is the prices. To charge £22 for the donburi, £50 for an entry-level bottle of wine and, somehow, £18 for that aubergine is to make the general lack of thrust, spark and flavour complexity pretty much unforgivable.
We did not linger for dessert, though our server — part of a generally sweet and eager team — tried her best, and gave us some spiel about Chef Back’s favourites and personal instruction. Oh. Was he still here then? “No, no,” she said quickly. “But he’ll be back soon I’m sure.” The conveyor belt had rumbled on, with forthcoming openings in Rome, Taipei, Jakarta and Bali to come.
Barely two weeks into the life of his latest outpost, Back had not fancied hanging around. I cannot say that I blame him.
