Tuesday 13 October
I love going to sushi restaurants. I love sushi itself slightly less. You have to be in the right frame of mind to scoff a wedge of eel-topped rice adorned with luminous green fish eggs. At Sushi Hiroba, your fish eggs come two ways: bright pink or luminous green. Pink I understand, but luminous green I find harder to accept. In any case, I do not like fish eggs. Really, the only sort of egg I enjoy issues forth from a hen’s undercarriage. I think this is perhaps why certain restaurants insist on writing ‘served with a hen’s egg’ on their menus. This used to seem annoyingly pedantic, but I am now coming to the conclusion that this is merely to reassure people like me, who fear most other sorts of eggs. Imagine if you ordered bubble and squeak and it came out topped with a tablespoon of luminous green fish roe or a platypus egg. I would run for the hills.
Fish eggs are always a bit of a nasty surprise. There is something slightly shocking about the way they burst in your mouth, leaving you with a salty oil slick you’re not quite sure what to do about. The last time I accidentally ate caviar (a canapé was involved) I was so shocked I had to clutch the arm of the stranger standing next to me. Generally I avoid. Equally, I have to be in the right mood to take the plunge with Nigiri. A great purplish slab of tuna may melt like butter against my palette, but there is alway that small chance that it will be fibrous, chewy and unfresh and flop against my chin as I try to saw through it with my incisors.
Tonight I was not entirely in the mood for proper sushi. But I did very much want to be at Sushi Hiroba, which is lovely and dark and bustling-not-busy with glowing lanterns. I could sit at their conveyor belt for hours on my own just squeezing edamame beans out of their pods, but they would probably turf me out as that’s the cheapest thing on the menu. I had arranged to meet a visiting Lucifer here for dinner. Poor Lucifer. She left all her clothes on the train from Bristol and was going to going to have to go to her meeting tomorrow as unfresh as a stale Nigiri. It did however mean that she didn’t have a vast suitcase to try to wedge under the conveyor belt, which is where I was sat. I love conveyor belts. I even love supermarket conveyor belts. They mesmerise me. By the time Lucifer had arrived I had just about managed a Generation Game feat of committing everything to memory – not that I was entirely sure what most of it was: Pink thing! Cross-section of octopus! Thing That Looks Like Baklava! Unidentified translucent white flesh! Cuddly toy!
Lucifer played safe and opted for a Katsu curry and an Asahi beer. “Don’t feel you can’t have a beer on my account,” I said piously. I then managed to refrain from asking her if I could sniff her glass for this is not a habit I should not fall in to: like when a dog tries to sniff your crotch, and you sort of have to accept it, but really shouldn’t have to accept it at the same time. I had a decent cup of green tea. I hate the bitter supermarket teabags where you have one mouthful and your throat constricts and involuntarily produces a “KKKKK!” sound. (Likewise I do not like soapy old jasmine tea, which is like old bathwater with birds nests floating in it, although that’s by-the-by). Green tea at Sushi Hiroba: it is soft and mild and caresses your tongue with fond regard. And you get free top ups.
Eatingwise, it was all very nice. For once, I managed to exercise some self-restraint and not singe my nasal passages with wasabi. I had a spread-eagled prawn, a mashed potato omelette, oh, and Thing That Looks Like Baklava, turned out not to be. It was savoury and contained an assortment of fish flesh, which is fine, but just not when you’re expecting baklava. Although why I was expecting baklava in a Japanese restaurant… well, serves me right really. As none of it's labelled there’s a lot of guesswork involved. The staff are marvels but they’re fairly nifty too so if you want to ask anything, ask quick.
Afterwards we traipsed to The Marquis on Chandos Place, one of my most favourite pubs. Yes, it’s a little metrosexual with its fresh flowers and teal tiles and Dyson Airblade hand-dryer – the future of hand-drying (you wouldn’t believe how much I long for one in my own bathroom). But it’s so pretty and they sell every lager you could ever imagine. Well… not quite. Nothing below 4%, which I felt quite sad about. Lucifer and I hefted ourself on to a pair of floral, swiveling stools (no matter what size you are, it is impossible to mount the stools with any degree of grace: they make me feel like a lumberjack after an operation for hemorrhoids) and sipped our andsodas – blackcurrantandsoda for Lucifer and limeandsoda for me and then Two-Woman showed up for a late order of chips. Question of the day: why does no one ever order orangeandsoda? Is it just horrible? As with Snakebite, do some pubs refuse to sell it? Is there some other reason? Why?
Units dodged: Five. Under normal circumstances, a bottle of Asahi with dinner, and a couple of pints of Amstel in vase-like glasses in The Marquis. But tonight, I was very happy with the green tea. It would have been nice to have had a Becks Blue in the Marquis though.
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