If your only experiences of oriental food have come through big restaurants, fast-food-style or takeaway outlets, Edamamé’s genuine Japanese home cooking will be a blast of clean, fresh air.
Tiny, clean and light, Edamamé’s informal atmosphere is intentional. The restaurant does not take bookings, so you are likely to find yourself sharing tables with other diners in proper noodle-bar style. At lunch they operate a pay-as-you-order system which keeps the diner turnover high, true to the refuelling-stop ethos of restaurants in Japan. All this and more is explained on each table’s display card and/or the menu, which assists you in choosing what and how to eat (eg. do as the Japanese do and order many small dishes to share; most people find a rice and two main dishes are enough for a meal for one; etc.), and the staff (normally the proprietors) are friendly and keen to help.
And now: the food. Six of us ate dinner in style, clearing every dish and basket placed in front of us and putting away a flask of sake and a bottle of deliciously sweet plum wine with it. No first trip to the place would be complete without the restaurant’s namesake, the addictive baby green soy beans that you can pop out of their pods and munch whilst deciding on your mains (don’t get distracted!). Veggies tired of getting distinctly fishy dishes when requesting a vegetarian option will be delighted by the menu’s division into the following categories: 1) meat, 2) fish, 3) vegetable dishes with fish stock, 4) vegetarian dishes with no meat or fish content, 5) salads.
The vegetarians amongst us sampled the tofu in both steak and deep-fried chunk form, and whilst slightly disturbed by the texture (imagine eating blancmange with chopsticks – quite unlike the rubbery stuff you get in supermarkets), we agreed it was worth a try. The fish-eaters made up the bulk of our order, choosing satsumaage (fishcakes like cocktail sausages in appearance and outer consistency – curiously addictive); samonbatayaki (chunks of salmon in butter); samon teri (delicious fillets in house teriyaki sauce) and the evening’s fish special: fresh salmon, leeks and sticky sushi rice in papery seaweed cones. The meat-eaters made quick work of the deep-fried pork cutlet, pork loin in soy and ginger (‘tender, sweet, delicious…could have eaten a lot more of it’) and the evening’s meat special: rump steak rolled around asparagus and leeks. In addition we shared seasoned potatoes, miso soup and the unmissable vinegary seaweed and cabbage salad and had one rice each, enjoying chopstick-fishing for the grains languishing in our soy and wasabi dipping dishes.
In contrast to many other oriental eateries in the city, the portions placed before you at Edamame look tiny, but don’t panic: the sticky white rice is of the sort that fills you up after a couple of mouthfuls, and the small dishes soon add up. We didn’t use any restraint, excusing our indulgence on the grounds that Edamamé don’t do desserts and we’d already had the plum dessert wine with our mains. As a result we spent £17 per head, though you could have eaten well for £10 (rice and other sides start at £1.50, main dishes are £3-£6). The plum wine was reasonable at £12, and had we liked, we could have sampled such intriguing Japanese drinks as calpis chu-hai (yoghurt and vodka) or oyuwari (vodka, hot water and a sour plum).
In short, Edamamé have got the whole dining experience down pat, and clearly attract many loyal customers as a result. From the moment you come through the hanging drapes at the door you feel that this is something special and different, and you will leave satisfied that it has been.
One last well-kept secret: they also do take-out if you turn up and ask.
(Please note that this is a review of a evening dinner session, and that menus vary at lunchtime and on sushi night. See Edamamé’s website for details.)
