Senkai, Regent Street - review

Its publicity material announces it as "London's first modern Japanese-inspired restaurant serving mainly British, sustainable produce". In fact, it's yet another attempt to cream off some customers from Nobu.

You go into an overmanned lobby and are led upstairs to one enormously long, thin, low-ceilinged room with half-circle windows looking out onto the grime of Regent Street, though it feels oddly like a basement. There are red banquettes and low tables and seats. In the centre of this corridor of a room there's a circular "raw bar" where sushi, sashimi and fish platters are prepared. The general atmosphere is like being in an ad calculated to project luxury and sophistication to a mass audience, irritating clubby music playing non-stop.

The service is ridiculously obsequious. We were asked if it was our first time, as though we were bound to become great friends; we were told our unsurprising choices were brilliant; our wine glasses were instantly refilled after the least sip. There was even an offer to order our food for us, lest, even after 15 years of Wagamama and Yo! Sushi we were baffled by terms like miso and nigiri - or perhaps just to save us the daunting labour of reading a longish menu for ourselves. For some people such service is key to an expensive meal, even more than what's on the plate - although the wider world might be unresponsive, here at least you can be flattered ceaselessly, everything bent to your purchasing power. For others, it's embarrassing, annoying and demeaning.

The menu is more authentically rich than authentically Japanese, offering ceviche, veal chop, rib-eye steak and grouse with bread sauce alongside the sushi and tempura. From the raw bar, "Chef's sashimi" (15 pieces, £28) was three thick slices each of bass, mackerel, scallop, salmon and sea-bream, served with home-made wasabi but no ginger - fresh, not bad but not exciting, a British let-down. Organic vegetable and prawn tempura (£14.50) was cauliflower, aubergine, broccoli and carrot with three big tiger prawns, nicely fried but served with horrid green chilli mayonnaise. Schichimi pepper squid (£9.75) was good quality, in a disconcertingly sweet batter.

From the robata grill, quail with watercress salad (£9.50) was one little bird halved, fiercely crisped yet not overcooked, very tender and well-flavoured. Scallops with yuzu brown butter (£16), though, were bland, again sweet, and over-rich with the butter, little lifted by any noticeable citrus.

This was not one of those Japanese meals leaving that clean, fat-free feel in the mouth. Actually, we enjoyed most the well-made, mushroom-loaded miso soup (£3.95).

Drinking is expensive here, the ambitious wine list opening at £29 a bottle. We didn't specially like either the Matetic Chilean Chardonnay (£39), one of those New World wines that tastes like a mash-up of grapes and oak chips, or the 2009 Chablis Bernard Defaix (£42), which seemed underpowered.

On Saturday night Senkai was sparsely populated, mainly with young, bankerish couples on dates, seeming unexcited by each other, downing champagne nonetheless. We'd have been happier at the cheap-as-chips sushi conveyor belt, Kulu Kulu, round the corner in Brewer Street.

65 Regent Street, W1 (020 7494 7600, senkairestaurant.com). Open Mon-Fri noon-3pm and 6pm-midnight; Sat 6pm-midnight; Sun 6pm-11pm. A meal for two with wine, £160-plus

Senkai
65 Regent Street, W1B 4EA