Ikeda

It is Friday evening. You have had a hell of a week. You have invited your friend to join you at one of the world’s best Japanese restaurants. She is early, you are late. As you enter you are greeted by the warm handshake of the young owner, Kenichi Ikeda, and cries of “Irasshaimase!” (Welcome!) from the team of waitresses and chefs.

Your friend smiles at you warmly as she sits punishing a glass of iced umeshu (plum wine) in the corner. You haul your tortured mind, soul and body onto the seat next to her and breathe out your tension and troubles. Healing begins.

Ikeda is quietly elegant. You choose to sit at the kitchen counter because it allows you to watch the chefs as they search for a perfect execution of their culinary skills. It is a Zen experience. They carefully clean and slice vegetables and fish with the minimum of waste and create the most beautiful shapes possible, dip shrimp in tempura batter and then hot oil, use their chopsticks to gently place freshly grated wasabi and ginger and finely chopped spring onions onto glistening pale cream hexahedrons of tofu, and finally, wash the cooking pots so quickly that you never see a dirty one. Peace and joy descend on your soul.

For Ikeda, meaning lies in creating a restaurant that delivers satisfaction and happiness for its clientele

A menu is gracefully proffered. Ikeda offers the best of every Japanese method of cooking, from tempura to spectacularly good sushi as well as new dishes created by the young chefs. Vegetarians are well catered for with dishes such as gingered aubergine, seaweed salad and yasai suimono (vegetable soup).

You drink Kubota Manju, a clean and elegant sake with hints of vanilla and pear, served cold. Will it be a one-bottle or a two-bottle night? It depends how much repair work needs to be done. The waitress offers you a tray of small handmade ceramic cups. Entering the Zen spirit, you allow your hand to select exactly the right cup. The sake is poured and you drink one sip, two sips, then a gulp.

It is a polite Japanese custom never to pour your own sake but to hope your dining companions will observe when it needs replenishing. You extend to them the same courtesy and consideration. Here, an exquisitely beautiful young lady in traditional Japanese dress pours the last of the sake into your cup and gently enquires if you’d like another bottle. The only sensible answer is “Hai. Domo arigato!”

Life holds some fundamental truths. First, you and I, and everyone we know, will be dead and forgotten one day in the not-too-distant future. Second, the universe is a ruthlessly efficient, indifferent and cruel place without any obvious larger purpose or meaning. And we have little agency to change the things life throws at us.

However, we have power over the small “here and now” things. Our relationships, our response to events, the effort we apply to our lives and our search for love. The way we slice a piece of fish or prepare a soup. And, most delightfully perhaps, lunch.

For Kenichi Ikeda, meaning lies in creating the best restaurant he can. Not the most profitable or the most famous. But one that delivers satisfaction and happiness to its clientele. A clientele that includes some of the most discerning and creative people in the world, including many of London’s top chefs. When you visit, pop down to the basement to see photos and messages of respect and approbation from the likes of Jimmy Page, George Clooney and Paul Weller. Vogue House is nearby, Claridge’s is diagonally across the road and within a guitar pick’s throw lie Jimi Hendrix’ and Georg Handel’s former digs. A suitable location in the quest for excellence.

One day I found myself next to a graceful Japanese woman of a certain age, beautifully dressed in black and accompanied by a man who treated her as if she were a piece of priceless porcelain. She quietly sipped tea and after a few minutes leaned back to whisper a few words to Kenichi. It was a request to be moved away from the large noisy man to her left. Because of her age, this required movement of chairs and tables and descent down a step with the assistance of two muscular men who magically appeared out of the general hurly-burly.

It was a painful demonstration of my general resistibility and the destruction of my brief fantasy of initiating a friendship with a Beatle wife. But, as the charm of beautiful food, refined décor and the kind and gentle resutoran sutaffu gradually soothed my punctured ego, I wondered: did John ever eat at Ikeda? One lady says he did.

The foundation story of Ikeda goes back to 1966, the year the Beatles performed five concerts at the Budokan in Tokyo. In the audience was a seventeen-year-old kitchen hand called Shigeru Ikeda, father of Kenichi. Shigeru was thrilled by the Beatles and the powerful western culture they represented, and he resolved one day to move to England.

Slowly he ascended the tough hierarchy of the Japanese culinary world, starting as errand boy and bottle-washer before becoming a chef. There followed an exacting process of learning Japanese cooking techniques; it was three years before he was allowed to use a knife. One exercise was to compete with a senior chef to move a large pile of rice grains, one by one, into a basket. If he made a mistake the rice was emptied from the basket and the competition began again. By such methods he learned fine control of chopsticks, knives and other kitchen tools.

Happo-en in Tokyo is a group of ancient buildings and gardens with a pond, cherry and maple trees and ancient bonsai. It is believed to be a residence of the early seventeenth-century samurai Ōkubo Hikozaemon who served as hatamoto to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Shogun. One of these buildings became one of Tokyo’s best restaurants and here Shigeru learned the highest standards of quality and refinement.

He moved to London in the early 1970s and, while working in one of its few Japanese restaurants, met, romanced and married one of the waitresses, Kimiko. She was to play a critical role in establishing the values of Ikeda over the next 50 years, while herself becoming an accomplished poet and composer of Haiku.

Both Shigeru and Kimiko were ambitious and wanted to escape the restrictions of Japanese society while exalting its traditional culture. By 1973 they’d scraped together enough money to open the restaurant at 30 Brook Street, Mayfair. It was to be elegant but modest, serving a broad range of Japanese dishes of the highest quality rather than focussing on one particular genre such as sushi, tempura or teppan yaki.

In the 1970s few British people ate raw fish so their early clientele was mainly Japanese diplomats and businessmen. When I started visiting in the early 2000s, Ikeda retained a delightful echo of that era’s Japanese expense-account culture – the bill was itemised into only three elements: food, drink and tobacco. This communicated an idea of absolute trust between restaurant and customer, and a certain generosity on the part of the host towards his guests.

After Shigeru died the restaurant was managed by a triumvirate of Kimiko, Kenichi and his brother Daisuke – another chef of genius who operates his own, more casual, restaurant, Bento-ya in Fitzrovia, and makes informative cooking videos, Cooking with chef Dai, for YouTube.

Notwithstanding Ikeda’s high prices, all profits are reinvested in the restaurant. The family lives modestly, apart from an annual trip to Japan to explore the culinary landscape. Kenichi took sole charge of the restaurant a decade ago and regards it as a sacred trust. Ikeda is his home, a place where he has a dinner party with friends every night. At a deeper level, it’s also somewhere he finds meaning and self-actualisation through the pursuit of beauty, perfection and, above all, service to others.

For us, too, Ikeda is a magical and spiritual place. More than a restaurant, it is a healing experience, a place of communion and an exercise in philosophy. It is Zen Buddhism in action.

A waitress brings an exquisite plate of the best quality sashimi, served with two sauces, and my friend turns to me with a devilish grin.

“Let’s eat!”

Ikeda, 30 Brook Street, Mayfair

Peter Hall is an environmental activist, ethical investor, entrepreneur and journalist. He brought the flat white to London when he opened the eponymous cafe in 2005