Oh look, Birmingham has acquired yet another Japanese restaurant, which is either cause for celebration or evidence that the city’s appetite for neon, sushi and expensive small plates remains insatiable. It’s another one that I find difficult to get excited about, because it’s another chain, of course, and one that has required six previous openings to discover that Birmingham exists. Kibou, on Temple Row, arrives with the confidence of somewhere that has already decided it is an event. There are murals, animations, elaborate upholstery and enough atmospheric lighting to make everyone look as though they have recently returned from somewhere more interesting. The Japanese aesthetic is deployed with considerable enthusiasm, although one suspects that in the modern restaurant business the distance between cultural appropriation and theatrical set dressing is sometimes measured in the thickness of a menu.
The menu is a grand tour of contemporary Japanese restaurant convention: sushi, sashimi, ramen, gyoza, katsu, tempura and the obligatory appearance of extremely expensive wagyu, that luxurious beef which has become the culinary equivalent of wearing a large watch. Kibou means hope, which is an agreeable sentiment to attach to a restaurant, although hope is not generally what one orders with the bill. What matters is whether the kitchen can turn all this promise into pleasure, whether the cooking has conviction beneath the presentation and whether the whole elaborate enterprise amounts to anything more than an attractive exercise in hospitality. Birmingham has seen plenty of restaurants arrive with promises. The interesting question is always what remains when the novelty has been eaten. The short answer is sadly not a lot.
If we were to go off service the restaurant is almost perfect, though this is a restaurant blog, and as my friend Lisa pointed out in the pub beforehand, I’m only good for rambling on about food. The said cooking sadly gets worse the more the kitchen has to do, from pumpkin croquettes that taste like Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages, to a katsu curry that smothers some overcooked chicken in a brown gummy sauce that is floury and has more than a whiff of butter chicken from my local Indian restaurant about it. The worst dish is a quite inedible deep-fried spicy chicken in a sauce the colour of badly applied fake tan and the patina of an aged copper kettle. It is vaguely spicy in the way Victoria Beckham used to be, with a blunt one-note heat. A muddle of sweetness, salt and synthetic chilli, the chicken itself seemed curiously absent, its flavour bullied into submission by a sticky, overconfident glaze. It was less of a dish than a sauce looking for somewhere to live.
The sushi is okay. The rice isn’t quite body temperature but is correctly vinegared. A lantern roll features decent quality salmon and tuna, with deep fried crab, mango, and some greens that are about as welcome as David Walliams at a communion. They send the ebi uramaki rolls unannounced and on the house, which are fortunately the best thing we eat all evening. The combo of prawn tempura and avocado works, even if having to tear the tails off is a phrase one should never have to type when talking about sushi. The bill comes with a discount that just about wipes out the inedible chicken; four dishes, a bottle of wine, and two decent cocktails, ninety quid. It is, at the minimum, affordable.
Nobu opened in New York in 1994, the offspring of a marriage between Japanese culinary discipline and Hollywood money. It was the moment Japanese food stopped being something you went out to eat and became something you went out to be seen eating. Since then we’ve seen a thousand restaurants trying to replicate that aura to – Roka withstanding – little effect. Kibou is clearly trying to do that; to be a place rather than a restaurant, and to tackle arguably the world’s most technical cuisine with a broad stroke. Sadly, the product is less Nobu and more neon Wagamama.
5/10
