Any international chain is going to suffer setbacks when bounding head first into a strange environment, but when Nobu’s previous chef made his departure we hoped he would take the restaurant’s lacklustre Japanese fare with him. We were disappointed. Brought in from Nobu Las Vegas, executive chef Karu Wedhas, the new master of the JW Marriott restaurant's kitchen, will feel right at home in the Beijing branch’s flashy environment. The cuisine isn’t much different from his former homes: a modified version of the international corporate boilerplate.
Chefs serve up thick slices of salmon sashimi with a refined touch, carefully carving rich slices of fresh fish. But in other dishes this nominally Japanese restaurant ditches the purity and simplicity of Japanese cuisine. Too many flavors flail around in some dishes, and there is enough oil to lubricate an aeroplane. Ginger and green onion, reminiscent of Cantonese cuisine, upstage the rather unremarkable salmon in the ‘new style’ sashimi . Isn’t sashimi supposed to be all about the fish? The soggy whitefish tempura hunks need to be wiped on a napkin before they are palatable, though the buttery nature of the fish was clearly present. But inflated prices, nearly 30 percent higher than the New York branch, make these dishes hard to stomach (especially when compounded by the mandatory 15 percent service charge).
Nothing can save dishes like the Angus beef teppanyaki, chewy to the point of being difficult to swallow, or the limp rock shrimp, coated with weak tempura batter that barely stands up to the copious amounts of heavy, spicy mayonnaise. And all of this with a new executive chef – it seems that the problems at Nobu are more institutionalized rather than the fault of any individual. If one was to be presented with food from Nobu in a takeaway carton, away from the celebrity searching and attentive service, it would be difficult to believe it came from the same chain that has received such praise elsewhere.
Address: Lower level of the JW Marriott, 83 Jianguo Lu, Chaoyang District 朝阳区建国路83号
Source: timeoutbeijing.com
