September 2025 - Food

Despite all the formalities (including a perfectly moist, heated towelette for your grubby fingers, a teeny tiny table for your chopsticks, and a slightly bigger one for your handbag,) there is something deeply chill about Roketsu. A fastidiously finessed Japanese restaurant in the Marylebone backstreets, everything here is so measured and elegantly formal, that all you have to do is simply turn up.

At Roketsu the chef’s table is the only table, and if the bleached, hinoki wood walls and sliding screens make you feel as if you’ve been transported to Japan, that makes sense – the room was built in Kyoto before being shipped and reassembled in London. Our nine course menu of spectacularly seasonal dishes is delivered in the form of stories, quietly but clearly told. There’s a layer of thinly cut radish across a bowl of soup made to look like ice on a lake, there are red beans to signify prosperity for the new year, and an all-seeing eyeball crafted from an egg wrapped in a sliver of conger eel. A hot-pot dish takes things even further, served in a ceramic castle tower, which makes you feel as if you’re feasting upon the map pages of a JRR Tolkien novel. It’s thoughtful rather than twee, calmly suggesting that food shouldn’t just sustain your stomach, but your imagination too. 

Naturally, the food here is masterful. Cornish lobster sashimi (we are shown the doomed lobster before he meets his fate) comes woven into a soy egg yolk concoction so creamy that we could have downed a jar of the stuff. Elsewhere, a frond of succulent yellowtail is perfectly-grilled and accessorised with a wedge of incandescently fragrant bergamot. What a joy a bergamot is! Neither lemon nor lime nor orange, and somehow better than all three. There’s also a finely chopped salad of Cornish crab, fennel, wakame, pear and carrot, humming with the coy tang of yuzu, a surprise mochi ball in a bowl of powerfully umami broth, and a playful platter that features everything from caramelised whole sardines to salty squid bottarga.   

Nine courses the menu might be, but each is light and fresh, even the hearty final flourish of salmon roe rice with a side of gentle Jerusalem artichoke soup. Rokestu’s kaiseki is the polar opposite of a mega one-plate British roast that has you groaning as you attempt to stuff down that last spud. Here, the food never seems to stop coming, but at no point do you feel like you’ve over exerted yourself. If only all meals were this relaxing.