Wild Izakaya review and star rating: ★★★★

The first thing you notice about Wild Izakaya is that this restaurant definitely used to be an office. Just what you want if you’ve just spent all day in yours. Dinner’s served with an evening dose of industrial-chic and polished concrete flooring!

Warming the space is a busy, open, central kitchen, from which steam billows high into those corporate rafters. Weirdly, my first thought is that Wild Izakaya reminds me of Scott’s, its frontage refusing to give away any of the restaurant’s secrets. An unassuming doorway leads to a dining room that manages to be simultaneously cosy, chaotic and theatrical. On a Monday evening, it was heaving.

Wild Izakaya: sushi in the City

There isn’t enough of this sort of thing in the City. We’re big fans of Luma Omakase’s cosmic sushi counter, and for a quick lunch there’s Koya in Bloomberg Arcade, while there’s always bridge-and-tunnel favourite – and Toast the City Award winner – Sushisamba if you want to get squiffy while eating your sushi to the accompaniment of live DJs. But in purely culinary terms, the Square Mile is under-represented when it comes to raw sliced fish.

Wild Izakaya helps to redress the balance. It was founded by George Bukhov-Weinstein and Ilya Demichev of the Wild Group, whose ten restaurants in London include Goodman, Lita in Marylebone and Wild in Notting Hill. This new venue – inspired by the Japanese izakaya pubs – is a bold new direction that extends their culinary repertoire beyond their Italian, US and Greek stalwarts. Executive chef Satoru Hashimoto arrives from Hokkaido via Koya in Mayfair, having spent more than a decade in Nobu Kitchens.

My advice is to forget whatever you think you know about sushi. Put your ego in the cupboard and eat whatever the staff say is good that day. Even if you do know a little about sushi (which, again, you probably don’t), feign ignorance – being led through the experience is part of the joy. Sit back and act like a spoiled prince, letting the good stuff be presented to you. The fatty tuna belly (which has the best flavour), the mackerel, the yellowtail, the turbot and the red sea bream – it all arrives fresh from Japan, air-shipped daily.

Dedicated sake specialist

There’s a dedicated sake specialist, too. Despite the odd brewery (there’s the very good Shogun Sakes in Peckham) sake is still underrepresented on these shores and largely misunderstood. Thankfully, recommendations are fast and fuss free. I particularly enjoyed a 17.5 per cent Nabeshima Daiginjo from the Saga region, as well as the painted sake urn etched with colourful drawings of sumo wrestlers, including matching cups.

The restaurant’s menu follows the familiar formula of nigiri and sashimi and maki rice rolls, followed by fried meat, skewers and fish. Start off restrained if you intend on surviving the five-course onslaught. With hindsight, the appetisers would probably make more sense as sides, but we behaved by ordering them first. We had the king crab cucumber salad, which was wonderfully minimalistic, and a punchy and colourful sashimi salad adorned with seaweed and a light ponzu dressing.

For the nigiri course we went conservative, enjoying wedges of salmon and tuna lopped off the animal a mere metre from our faces. We interrupted the chef with questions while we chomped. “Which one is that?” They must hate working out front, especially when they get someone like me seated in front of them. Next came fine slivers of scallop, vibrant enough they don’t need the bells and whistles of the cooked variants you find in gastropubs.

Jidori chicken

The WFC Karaage is the capital’s latest attempt at giving fried chicken a glow-up (another is the Claridge’s Fried Chicken) this fried Jidori chicken representing the menu’s first hit of hedonism after the cold courses.

From the skewers, the wagyu with shoyu koji is hella indulgent – the sticks decorated with great chunks of this famous cow, which urban legend would suggest are serenaded by classical musicians and massaged in their native Japan. The sake pourers diligently paired something new each time – saltier, sweeter, boozier, more refined – each serving arriving in an impossibly cute little cup.

You get the impression everyone genuinely gives a shit. The service is flawless and the recommendations on point – mostly, it’s just aggressively fun. Sit at the counter and lean in to the anything goes approach.

Go to wildizakaya.co.uk or call 020 8191 3261