Ine

Ine in Hampstead is the sister of Taku.  It opened in early 2024. It has a sushi counter with bar stools as you entered, supplemented by several tables beyond. There was a tasting menu at £130, or a shorter lunch version at £65. There were also simpler dishes available at lunch such as donburi (rice bowl) and chicken karaage (fried chicken).

The meal began with a simple tomato dashi broth, whose tomatoes had good flavour (14/20). This was followed by raw Spanish tuna otoro with finely flaked white asparagus (from the UK) and French caviar. The tuna was good and the caviar was pleasant, but the asparagus was rather lost in the dish. It provided another texture and was a counterpoint to the richness of the tuna, but I wonder whether it was the best choice of ingredient in this role (14/20).

Next was sashimi of sea bass that had been brushed with a little soy sauce, served with an olive oil-based garnish, alongside chu toro served with freshly grated Japanese wasabi. Both fish had very good flavour, and the wasabi had pleasing texture as well as the gentle spicy bite that you get with real wasabi, much better than the raw heat from the coloured horseradish and mustard in a tube that oases for “wasabi” in too many London restaurants (15/20).

A truffle risotto came with maitake mushrooms that had been cooked in beef fat, along with salted egg yolk and grated Australian black truffle. This was for me less successful. Maitake mushroom is a fairly tasteless mushroom compared to things like morels or ceps or matsutake, but the real problem was the risotto, which just wasn’t very good. If it had been introduced as “soggy rice” then at least that would have been accurate, but even the black truffle could not really rescue this (12/20).

The meal got back on track with grilled red mullet with tomato, kombu, courgette and a courgette and basil sauce. This dish didn’t seem to go down that well with some other diners, but I thought that the fish was cooked well and the admittedly somewhat bland courgette was enhanced by the basil (14/20). Next was a genuinely good dish of pickled scallop and yuzu jelly, the scallop naturally sweet an beautifully balanced by the acidity of the yuzu (16/20).

The meal then moved into a sushi phase, based on an unspecified Japanese rice (the chef that was interacting with us seemed to have limited knowledge of where the various ingredients were from). The first sushi was turbot with fish liver sushi, followed by scallop sushi and then sea bass sushi. These were all quite good, the rice arguably a touch loose compared to the ideal, but the toppings were of good quality (15/20). Cooked tuna tendon was tender and rich, and although it was enjoyable it perhaps would have benefitted from something to balance the natural fattiness (14/20). This was followed by a nori roll of Cornish mackerel, followed by prawn sushi and then yellowtail sushi, all of which were enjoyable. The sushi sequence finished with otoro tuna sushi and then a nori roll with tuna otoro, egg yolk and cucumber (15/20).

The final savoury course was A5 grade wagyu from Kagoshima in Kyushu, lightly grilled and served with a green salad with a suitable sharp dressing that nicely cut through the richness of the beef (15/20). In Japan there is rarely much in the way of dessert at such meals except either fruit or, in a sushi meal, tomago omelette. Here was a cube of cheesecake, which was harmless enough but was fairly unmemorable (13/20). The waitress that we had was very nice and this meal came to £190 for the food and wines. You could certainly eat for less here, especially if you came for the lunch menu. If you had the shorter tasting menu and some drinks then a typical cost per person might be around £105, though you could eat less with the lunchtime dishes on the a la carte. Overall I enjoyed Ine, and though there was some inconsistency throughout the meal, the general standard was quite high and the best dishes were very good indeed.