Asakusa is an unassuming, hidden away gem, just round the corner from Mornington Crescent tube station. Renowned for it’s authentic Japanese cuisine, there were certainly enough Japanese people frequenting the place to back this claim up. The service is more no-frills functional than michelin star luxury, but it is worth bearing for the high quality food.

The decor is pretty awful, with lots of hand written prices and laminated pictures of the food, crammed between old posters of Asahi, all attached to the somewhat manky flock wallpaper. The decor, however, belies the quality of the food, which I found to be superb. The menu is thankfully written in both English and Japanese so you at least have some clue what you’re ordering. The food is of the type that you can order more after your initial order and it doesn’t come in any particular sequence.

The sushi section of the menu is split into Nigiri (slices of ingredient on a block of rice), Maki rolls (as above) and Sashimi (sliced raw fish with no rice). You are able to order each individual piece, so can have a mix of exactly what you want. We started with a platter of mackerel, salmon and tuna sashimi, all of which was exceedingly fresh, luxurious & silken to the taste. The nigiri was even better, in particular the mackerel, which was absolutely amazing. The prawn nigiri was also excellent and the tuna and salmon not too shabby either. Following this platter we tucked into a maki roll platter; a mixture of california rolls, oshinko maki (Japanese pickle) and the like. The spicy tuna rolls were my personal favourite, along with the oshiko maki, which were a good contrast to the fish maki rolls.

Onto the hot courses, we went for Barbecued Eel in a Special Sauce, Chicken Teryaki and Beef Shoboyaki. The Eel was very tasty, I guess a kind of poor man’s Black Cod, with the Chicken being succulent and sweet. I wasn’t too keen on the beef, which wasn’t tender enough for my liking and was the only semi-duff food I ate all night.

Attempting to be as authentic as the locals, we were drinking flasks of cold sake, which went down very well indeed. Unfortunately, the largest flask was 300ml and the four of us had no problems knocking back about 8 of the buggers, which wasn’t really authentic behaviour!

To those who say that sushi doesn’t fill them up, I would suggest visiting Asakusa and a few platters of sushi, as I certainly didn’t have much, if any, room in my stomach by the end of the night. The prices are pretty reasonable and we absolutely stuffed ourselves on food for about £25 a head. The gluttonous consumption of sake raised that closer to £40 a head, but more refined types than myself can certainly get away with a far modest bill than that.