Engawa: Undoubtedly delicious

David Sexton savours the decadent taste of Kobe beef at this highly authentic Japanese restaurant
Box of delights: among the many treats to be found at Engawa are these boxes of sashimi (Picture: Matt Writtle)
David Sexton31 January 2018

Mount Fuji, samurai, sushi and geisha. That’s Japan summed up for most non-Japanese, apparently. It seems quite knowledgeable to me, possibly even quite Japanese, what with Fujisan leading the roll-call.

But Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry thinks it shows ignorance of “all the other allures that Japan has on offer” and has launched a programme called the More Than Fujiyama, Samurai, Sushi, Geisha Project to support small to medium businesses “to share their Japan-made products and services with the world”.

In London, Engawa, a small, luxurious new restaurant within the Ham Yard Hotel development, offering traditional cuisine (washoku) and hospitality (omotenashi), is one such project, launched in collaboration with the Salt Consortium, which operates more than 40 restaurants and bars in Japan. It’s been developed over the past few months with great care and seriousness, as an intriguing blog recording its progress — and frankly appalled by slack British workmanship (“procedures and attitudes that would be unthinkable in Japan”) — reveals.

The unique selling point here is that Engawa serves genuine Kobe beef: banned from import until last May, the most expensive and sought after beef in the world. It’s produced under extraordinarily strict conditions, from cattle of pure and ancient Tajima-gyu lineage, born and raised in Hyogo Prefecture, fed only grains and grasses from the prefecture and attaining a specific fat marbling ratio. Only around 3,000 such cattle are raised each year, of which only 10 per cent or so are exported, a lot of these going to Monaco and Switzerland, all of the meat readily traceable online.

So it’s a complete rarity, the “caviar of meat”. The more familiar Wagyu beef, on the other hand, means simply Japanese cattle — and it’s not the same thing at all, as a notorious 2012 article in Forbes (“Food’s Biggest Scam: the Great Kobe Beef Lie”) revealed. For years what was sold as Kobe beef in the US was mostly not even Japanese in origin.

In urban legend, these happy few Kobe cows are played music, given beer to drink and massages all round. The Kobe Beef Marketing Association (kobe-niku.jp) ums and aahs about whether this actually occurs. “There may well be some farms rearing low numbers of cattle who are doing things bordering on this” but it’s not standard procedure, they say.

Luxurious: Engawa offers traditional Japanese cuisine (washoku) and hospitality (omotenashi) (Picture: Matt Writtle)

So is Kobe beef genuinely distinctive? Yes. Worth all the fuss and expense? It depends. It’s listed at the new luxury steak restaurant M Grill in Threadneedle Street at £150 for a 150g fillet, simply grilled. But in each of the menus at Engawa, small portions of it are served in different, traditional styles, a much better way to explore its taste.

Evening menus are three (£60), five (£80) or eight courses (£100) and at lunch 11 (£30) and 14-piece (£40) bento boxes are offered, alongside a few simpler dishes. At the start of this week, Engawa was still in its protracted soft opening, with 50 per cent off the food while they perfected the menu: it certainly wasn’t because of any unpreparedness in the cooking.

A nine-course evening menu, with choices within each course, offered last week, was a quite overwhelming succession of tastes and textures, served with extraordinary precision and elegance. From the appetisers, the highlights were Kobe beef yukhoe, finely shredded beef in dashi stock with grated yam and spring onion julienne, spectacularly served atop a giant brick of ice, the taste delicate yet deeply meaty, a first introduction to Kobe beef’s qualities.

Chawan-mushi with Kobe beef soup, served in a little cylinder ceramic, was wispy egg custard in great beef stock, heightened with a little shaved black truffle: intoxicatingly delicious and intense. A plainer tempura dish followed, a deep-fried ball of diced vegetables.

A beautifully presented nine-section box of sashimi was an absolute treat in every way, including visually, each little dish served in a tiny, pretty ceramic bowl of its own, an extravagant labour of careful preparation, the fish including squid, scallop, sea bass, tuna and salmon, the beef prepared in several different ways — raw, seared and cooked — with surprisingly strong herby and citrussy tastes added throughout, as well as a good deal of sweetness. So many flavours in a single course feels almost crazily luxurious.

Next up came Kobe beef and vegetables lightly cooked shabu shabu style in broth, with ponzu dressing and more citrussy yuzu peel, and an alternative beef sukiyaki dish, thinly sliced with vegetables in a sweet soy dressing. Then there were amazing little steaks, served crisped at the edges but rare inside, sirloin and rump cuts we had chosen from the raw meat elegantly presented to us in a lacquer box, displaying the incredible speckling and marbling of fat that makes this beef so special.

Kobe beef is a truly decadent taste like caviar or foie gras: it’s not just very tender, as other beef can be, it actually, quite perceptibly, melts away in the mouth as you eat, like no other meat I’ve tasted. Containing unsaturated fatty acids that melt at temperatures lower than that of the human body, this beef releases a flow of rich buttery sensation, above and beyond its actual fruity flavour, as you savour it — it is weird and delectable in very small quantities, although I’d find the idea of eating a whole Western-sized steak like this quite challenging and inappropriate.

More courses followed: tuna and sea-bass sushi, plus a Kobe beef maki roll, then beef chazuke (slow cooked beef on rice with a little jar of beef dashi stock to pour over) and ramen noodles with the stock, with sesame seeds and green chopped herbs. Finally a tofu cheesecake came as a kind of fondue with a green tea-infused chocolate dipping sauce... By now, we were bewildered and sated.

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Too many courses! At lunchtime it’s simpler. The 14-piece bento box at £40 offers an extravaganza of tastes, including fish and beef sashimi as well as a variety of tiny servings of the cooked beef dishes, with a bowl of rice and a beef and cabbage soup on the side. Going even simpler, Kobe beef gyu don (£20) is a cheaper cut, sliced fine and cooked on the teppan griddle, served on rice, with a beaker of beef stock to turn the dish into chazuke as you go on — a comparatively plain and wholly satisfying meal in itself, still with that unique Kobe beef melt in the mouth.

Engawa is small (29 covers), even this number being quite crammed in to accommodate a bar area serving cocktails and sake, but it is elegantly designed and the service is assiduous and friendly (the manager, Daniel Ashworth, has come from Nobu) and you can watch the five serious-faced chefs, led by Akira Shimizu, working away with such neatness and precision in the open kitchen.

It’s undoubtedly as authentic an experience of washoku and omotenashi as London has to offer and that makes it, expensive as it is, a bargain. Tickets to musicals in the West End cost almost as much, I’m told — and they cannot possibly deliver such artistry and sensation.

Open Mon-Sat noon-2.45pm and 6pm-10pm (last seating); Sun noon-2.45pm and 6pm-9.30pm (last seating). About £100 for lunch, £200 for dinner.

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