Thirty years ago, a Japanese meal in London would have looked something like the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill, only without the bloodshed: kimino-clad waitresses swishing through bamboo screens to wait on diners seated cross-legged on tatami mats on the floor. Then, in the late Nineties, along came Wagamama Yo! Sushi and Nobu and suddenly Japanese food was both approachable and exclusive in a different way. Japanese food was, in a word, cool.
Londoners haven’t lost their appetite for all-things Nippon — Japanese restaurants are opening at a rate of about 10-a-year — but there is now an appreciation that there is far more to the cuisine than sushi and noodles.
Ultra-expensive omakase meals, especially, have taken the capital by storm since lockdown, but eating Japanese in London needn’t mean taking out a second mortgage, and below are the 16 best Japanese restaurants in London for all budgets, showcasing one of the world’s richest culinary repertoires. As they say at Nobu: irasshaimase! Welcome…
Temaki
As the name suggests, this Brixton Market chef’s counter specialises in temaki, the seaweed rolls filled with sushi rice and seafood before being transported to the mouth via the hand — an excellent option for anyone who has yet to get to grips with chopsticks (though all sushi, really, should be eaten with one’s fingers — but don’t try that with sashimi). Fillings include the likes of prawn tempura, barbecued eel and miso aubergine for under £10 a pop — brilliant value when even the lobster with egg yolk, miso and citrus version clocks in at £9. Set menus starting at £24 for four hand rolls are even more impressive, but there’s more to the place than temaki: there’s also yellowtail sashimi, vegetable tempura and monkfish karaage, with sakés, cocktails and kombucha to wash it all down with.
12 Market Row, SW9 8LF, temaki.co.uk
Abeno
Proof that there is more to Japanese cuisine than super-expensive raw fish, Abeno has been introducing Londoners to the delights of okonomiyaki since 1993. The delicacy is often referred to as Japan’s equivalent of a pancake, though in truth it is halfway between that and a cabbagey omelette, a fact that is easier to grasp while watching one cooked to order at the hotplate set into each table. All that the diner must do is choose the fillings: everything from a simple pork number to a “Sapporo mix” of squid, prawn and salmon. At around £17 per pancake, Abeno is decent value for a tasty, filling and nutritious meal, which explains why the spartan dining room in Bloomsbury is usually packed to the rafters with everyone from British Museum tourists to UCL students and homesick Japanese. Abeno does take reservations, though, so it’s worth booking ahead.
47 Museum Street, WC1A 1LY, abeno.co.uk
Eat Tokyo
Wagamama might be the obvious Japanese chain but there are now eight branches of Eat Tokyo around London plus a further three in Germany and six in Tokyo. Economies of scale mean that this is one of the better-value places in the capital to eat sushi and sashimi, though lower prices should not be taken as an indicator of inferior quality. Bento boxes piled high with everything from nigiri and tempura to fried chicken and grilled eel offer the most bang for the buck, or the long menu provides an almost endless choice of ordering à la carte. Japanese ownership means authenticity is guaranteed, not least at the Golders Green branch, which offers the onomatopoeic speciality of shabu shabu, a DIY hotpot in which meat and veg is briefly cooked at the table in hot stock before being dunked in dipping sauce; you be the judge whether the noise of the ingredients swishing in the pot makes the sounds of “shabu shabu”.
Various branches, eattokyo.co.uk
Sushi Kanesaka
Eyebrows were raised in summer 2023 when it was announced that Tokyo-based sushi master Shinji Kanesaka would be opening the UK’s most expensive restaurant at five-star hotel 45 Park Lane. Was it the Mayfair location that was sending the bill into the stratosphere, or the effort expended on sourcing the most exceptional British seafood and, when there is no homegrown equivalent, importing the very best from Japan? The proof is not only in the pudding — the sweetest, most perfect fresh fruit one is ever likely to eat — but in each melt-in-the-mouth creation assembled behind a 300-year-old cedar counter before being placed straight into guests’ hands. Quite simply, the sushi here tastes better than anywhere else in the country. The £420 entry price for 17 bitesize courses might make this a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but one well worth saving up for, though don’t expect to make a night of it: diners are in and out in under two hours.
45 Park Lane, W1K 1PN, dorchestercollection.com
Jin Kichi
Londoners might be used to one menu offering an encyclopaedic list of every Japanese dish but in the Land of the Rising Sun, the best restaurants specialise in just one style of cooking, done very, very well. At this casual, evening-only Hampstead classic, that is pretty much yakitori: skewers of whatever is freshest at the market that day — from king prawn or pork with asparagus to ox tongue or chicken gizzards — given a quick turn under the intense heat of the charcoal grill before a sticky slick of soy and mirin glaze is applied. It’s easy for all that protein to bulk up the bill; fill out your order with some carbs along the lines of spicy tuna rolls. No one will mind if you ask for your saké to be served hot — a reminder that Jin Kichi has been going since the early 1990s, years before anyone had ever heard of saké sommeliers.
73 Heath Street, NW3 6UG, jinkichi.com
Endo at the Rotunda
Endo Kazutoshi grew up in the family restaurant in Yokohama established by his grandfather and trained in Nagoya before his sushi master sent him to work at the Japanese embassy in Madrid. He eventually chose London as his home, becoming the head sushi chef at Zuma, and Japan and Spain’s loss is absolutely the UK’s gain. The chef oversees the food at some of London’s most accomplished Japanese restaurants — Nijū in Mayfair, Kioku in Westminster, Sumi in Notting Hill — but the purest expression of his affinity with seafood is on display at this White City HQ. An 18-course menu (£275) is served to 10 diners around a 200-year-old cypress counter in the former BBC Television Centre, where the nighttime views of a glowing cityscape could just as easily be Osaka as London. Expect a daily changing menu of faultless sushi prepared with as much individual flair as the crockery it is served on, accumulated by Kazutoshi on trips back to Japan.
8th Floor, The Helios, Television Centre, 101 Wood Lane, W12 7FR, endoatrotunda.com
Koya
If Japanese cuisine has a comfort food then it is udon, the fat ropes of slithery noodles that absorb pretty much any flavour they are exposed to and are possessed of a deeply satisfying slurpability that precludes any attempt at genteel table manners. What elevates Koya’s house-made version is a chewiness that might just be the embodiment of mindful eating, and there’s certainly much to contemplate here, from how the signature English breakfast udon — fried egg, bacon and butter-soy mushrooms — make something so wrong taste so right, to the compelling contrast of the c: a hot dashi broth with cold noodles on the side. Each of the trio of Koyas is distinctly individual: walk-ins only in the tiny Soho original for spontaneity, bookable tables at the Bloomberg Arcade for City socialising, and noodles eaten standing up at Broadway Market as if waiting for a bullet train (though there are sit-down tables, too).
E8, EC4 and W1, koya.co.uk
Roka
Roka started life as a West End alternative to Zuma, which along with Nobu was the definitive turn-of-the-century cool Japanese. While there’s still a nostalgic charm to dining at Nobu and Zuma, Roka feels bang-up-to-date, even though the Charlotte Street original opened in 2004. The wraparound windows flood the dining room with daylight at lunchtime while making the restaurant an alluring spectacle to passers-by when illuminated at night but it’s the quality of the cooking from the horseshoe open kitchen that keeps everyone from Fitzrovia ad execs to sushi connoisseurs coming back for more. Kick off with some spinach in sesame sauce, follow with rock shrimp tempura and Korean-spiced lamb cutlets and finish Japanese-style with sushi, whether traditional salmon nigiri or a smashing contemporary take such as tempura wagyu maki. There are other London outposts at Aldwych, Canary Wharf and Mayfair but they’re not quite as nice.
37 Charlotte Street, W1T 1RR, rokarestaurant.com
Dinings SW3
While Knightsbridge may be the spiritual home of the high-end modern Japanese — original scenester Zuma has since been joined by, inter alia, Sumosan, Clap and The Aubrey — Dinings SW3 attracts a more discreet crowd. The slightly hard-to-find location on a cobbled mews away from the shops helps, as too a subtly decorated dining room where the focus is very much on the food. And what food: rice tacos piled with fatty tuna glossy with spicy sesame emulsion; sushi rolls filled with hand-picked crab and truffle miso; wagyu beef cooked on a Josper grill to crisp up the luscious fat. Vegetarian options such as chilled seaweed udon noodles are no less diverting while desserts that inject Japanese ingredients into Western classics — think yuzu cheesecake — are well worth saving space for. There’s a cute courtyard, too, but the big windows fill the room with light even if it’s not warm enough to sit outside.
Walton House, Lennox Gardens Mews, Walton Street, SW3 2JH, diningssw3.co.uk
Humble Chicken
Humble Chicken is not quite so humble as when half-German, half-Japanese chef Angelo Sato first opened his L-shaped chef’s counter as a yakitori specialist in 2021. Two years later, the chef relaunched the Soho site with a 16-course tasting menu (£185) inspired by his Japanese childhood and European cheffing career. Fortune favours the brave and in early 2025 Sato was rewarded with two Michelin stars for his efforts; a total refurb will see the chef firing on all cylinders to achieve a third. The menu is planned and prepped each morning but signatures such as the This Little Piggy — a pig trotter and mustard bao bun — are constants while, to drink, there are sakés paired with each course.
54 Frith Street, W1D 4SJ, humblechickenuk.com
Uchi
Uchi means “inside” in Japanese and, while from the outside it looks like any-old east London local on a residential street corner, once through the noren curtain and Uchi is like the platonic ideal of a hip Clapton dining room: brushed-gold tabletops, untreated wooden stools, covetable glass vases and staff kitted out in denim smocks that may make you consider upgrading your apron at home to something altogether more chic. Short menus always inspire confidence in the quality of the cooking to come and it is justified at Uchi, where each day’s specials are displayed on cute sheets of pink and black notepaper paper-clipped to the wall: not just the expected gyoza, miso black cod and mixed sashimi, but also wagyu nigiri, halloumi black rice rolls and crab sarada, a salad of Japanese crab sticks.
144 Clarence Road, E5 8DY, uchihackney.com
Sushi Tetsu
So difficult is it to secure a reservation at Sushi Tetsu that there is almost no point including it in a selection such as this — except those lucky/determined enough to have eaten here swear it is the best sushi in the capital. Of course, the palaver of booking one of the seven seats at the blond-wood counter only adds to the allure, but Sushi Tetsu, hidden down a Clerkenwell alley, is as close as London gets to the secrecy of the sort of tiny invite-only restaurants one finds in Japan. Nobu-trained chef Toru “Tetsu” Takahashi prepares peerless nigiri, temaki and sashimi behind the counter while his wife Harumi sees to guests, though the 15-course omakase experience isn’t as traditional as the set-up suggests, with fatty tuna and squid as likely to be blow-torched as served au naturel. And compared to many high-end Japanese joints, the price of £167 for omakase, served over three hours, is a snip.
2 Jerusalem Passage, EC1V 4JP, www.sevenrooms.com
Taku
If you have Sushi Kanesaka tastes but can’t quite stretch to the financial outlay then consider Taku, which at £180 for the lunchtime omakase is over half the price. It’s a similar drill to Kanesaka, though not quite as traditional in feel: diners are greeted at the door by super-friendly staff before being ushered through a curtain to a 16-seat counter where a 17-course meal is served over the course of 90 minutes over one lunchtime sitting and two in the evening (when it costs £380 for 22 courses). The quality of fish, mostly sourced from British waters, is exquisite: sublimely fatty toro, for instance, has its lusciously mouth-filling flavour amplified with a liberal sprinkling of salt. As for the name: Taku is executive chef Takuya Watanabe, who holds one Michelin star for his Paris restaurant Jin and picked up another one here four months after opening.
36 Albemarle Street, W1S 4JE, takumayfair.com
Sushi Atelier
If the name makes this Fitzrovia restaurant sound like a Japanese cookery school, there’s more than a touch of the chef demo to Sushi Atelier, where half a dozen chefs stand behind a counter turning out perfect versions of contemporary sushi. Every element is just-so, from the individual grains of the ever-so-slightly warm rice to the toppings draped across it, from traditional sea bass and sea urchin to some jazzy sushi rolls studded with rice crackers or dripped with basil mayo. With siblings including Soho newcomer Himi and pricey Chisou in Knightsbridge and Mayfair, the quality of ingredients is assured, though here a bit more affordable: sushi set-lunch prices start at £25 for 13 pieces, while the surroundings are correspondingly (and refreshingly) informal.
14 Great Portland Street, W1W 6PH, sushiatelier.co.uk
Mu
Japanese restaurants might not have a reputation for being the most fun places to hang out, but most Japanese restaurants are not in Dalston, where live music is as much an expectation on a night out as natural wines and cocktails. All are on offer at Mu, where jazz and Afrobeats, skin-contact wines and mixology are the accompaniment to cooking focused on the robata grill, courtesy of the same team behind the Brilliant Corners listening bar up the road. Start with grilled shishito pepper with yuzu salt ahead of chicken thigh with grilled lime and sansho pepper or pork tonkatsu with hispi cabbage and pickles, and throw in some sea bass sashimi, beef gyozas and nori fries for good measure. A three-course set menu (£48) can keep the price down.
432-434 Kingsland Road, E8 4AA, mu-ldn.com
The Aubrey
It would be easy to dismiss a Japanese restaurant within the Mandarin Oriental hotel as merely a sop to the jet-lagged super-rich for whom, whatever time zone they are in, it is always sushi o’clock. The Aubrey certainly looks the luxey part, like a low-lit lacquered box of fin-de-siècle decadence (art nouveau aesthete Aubrey Beardsley is the guiding spirit). But while the menu namechecks pretty much every modern Japanese classic — new-style yellowtail sashimi; miso-glazed aubergine — the quality of cooking raises it head and shoulders above just another Knightsbridge Japanese, with chicken karaage marinated in charcoal, and fried rice studded with lobster and sea urchin, just two standouts. The cocktail offering is every bit as considered, a deep-dive into saké, shochu, umeshu and whisky. Walking your pooch in Hyde Park? The Aubrey is dog-friendly, too.
Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7LA, theaubreycollection.com
