Chef Leo Tenyag and his team deliver very fine dishes in Liverpool Street, but the venue’s price point sets a high bar for the whole experience
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What you want, when spending a significant amount of money on a meal in a restaurant is an experience that will burn itself into your memory.
It should be an something that continues to touch you years after you sat at that table and tasted those dishes.
That’s what makes paying those hefty sums worthwhile – it’s the essence of value in fine dining.
For such an outlay, the expectation of perfectionism is a given.
Price is important because it allows restaurants to calibrate the expectations of diners.
The tariff is a deceleration of quality (albeit a completely insufficient one) but probably the best customers can expect as a rough guide to navigating radically different offerings across the city.
There are currently six restaurants in London with three Michelin stars.
At two of them you can pay £225 per head for a tasting menu.
Luna Omakase charges £200+ per head for its offering.
That’s a broad brush stroke advertisement to customers – it promises a level of quality at a venue that has yet to be recognised by the guide.
Of course, what a tyre manufacturer believes is of merit should always be taken with a pinch of salt and a generous dollop of caveats, but that price point is a bar this restaurant has chosen to set itself.
what happens at Luna Omakase
In short, the experience is as follows.
Luna Omakase sits within Japanese-Mexican fusion restaurant Los Mochis at Broadgate Circle.
It is a 12-seat private room with a central prep area.
Here chef Leo Tanyag and his team deliver dishes to guests directly who sit up at the counter overlooking the cooks.
Mostly the food is delivered on fancy ceramics, but occasionally straight into diners’ hands.
The preamble has some of the characteristics of a theatre performance.
Guests gather at the main restaurant’s bar and enjoy views of St Paul’s from its ninth floor position while sipping aperitifs.
Then, at the appointed time we’re collected and led to the private space decorated with a dozen circular paintings by Oms Rocha.
These symbolise “life’s perpetual rhythm”, apparently.
As they’re lit from behind, they also have the pleasing effect of giving diners glorious halos at certain angles.
It’s as though we’re all characters immortalised in Byzantine iconography.
from drinks to dining
Here’s what happens in the room.
First it’s time to decide on drinks.
These all come at an additional cost with a wine flight, a sake flight and a non-alcoholic flight all on offer.
Service begins with a gong and we’re treated to around 12 courses (oddly we count 14), expertly finished in front of us plus four drinks that are poured at various intervals.
At the end, one of the diners is invited to bash the gong again and the formalities are over.
Then follows the inevitable selfie session for those who wish to partake.
positives and negatives
Overall, there are things I really like about Luna Omakase, but others that, given the punchy cost, are underwhelming.
The set up is very much for a performance – a shared experience for 12 lucky people to indulge in together.
But the various couples are shown to our allotted seats around three sides of the rectangular prep area and there’s nothing to break the ice.
Things do warm up a little as the evening gets going, but serving each course in turn creates the effect of silos at the counter.
Different chefs talk to and serve different people, sometimes in sequence.
The result is I feel mild guilt eating a piece of delicate nigiri under the envious gaze of a diner at the other end of the counter, knowing they won’t get theirs for several minutes.
By the time they’ve been served, we’re moving on and the opportunity for any shared conversation on what we’ve just eaten is lost.
Partly because the 12 courses are small and often eaten in a single bite, this lends a disjointed feel to things rather than cementing the idea of a coherent, well balanced evening.
Further jarring is achieved with a sommelier who is given the impossible task of detailing three separate drinks flights when our glasses are refreshed.
I don’t care about the characteristics of a glass of Bordeaux someone else is enjoying at the counter, just as they have no interest in the sake I’m sipping.
At any one time, the lengthy intro to each pouring is at best of interest only to a third of those present at the lecture, with two thirds of the eyes round the table wandering.
As there are only four glasses and 12-plus radically different dishes, the flights’ relevance to the actual food is also debatable and the sommelier doesn’t attempt to relate the “matches” preferring instead to stay in the safer territory of citrus notes and wet pebbles.
inspired by the moon?
There’s also a question about how well the whole evening is framed.
The 12 seats and paintings echo the new moons in a year – this appears to be a convoluted way of saying the menu changes with the seasons, which isn’t especially ground breaking.
But we’re also promised “12 stories” and that the menu “follows the rhythm of the moon – birth, growth, change and renewal”.
There’s confusion here rather than the pure clarity of lunar light on a cloudless night.
The show tries to do too much and gets in a bit of a muddle.
The setup suggests a performance – and there are moments when blowtorches are waved and dry ice comes wafting out of black orbs – but the chefs are cooks rather than natural entertainers.
Their interest is in delivering on the plate rather than in showing off in front of an audience.
Expensive meals that become etched in our brains cut into them with the clarity and precision of a perfectly honed knife.
They are choreographed, timed, rehearsed and yet feel natural, relaxed and astonishing.
For me, these include Cuisine Minceur and warmth from Michel Guérard, the molecular insanity of Marc Veyrat, deconstructed apple crumble from Richard Corrigan, ice cream overhanging the Royal Festival Hall with Daniel Clifford and broth drizzled over Jean-Luc Rocha’s sliced cuttlefish.
The overall experience at Luna Omakase doesn’t get there, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to praise.
Luna Omakase: the good stuff
Chef Leo is engaging.
Scared of the ocean (because of all the fish he’s cut up over the years), we learn his family are mostly cooks save his dad who’s an engineer.
There’s serious skill on the plate too, with dishes often drawing on Mexican flavours and weaving them into his Japanese creations.
It’s an unlikely marriage, perhaps, but one that works with tacos and chilli tricking up the plates.
The fish served is, as expected, exceptional whether it’s king crab, amberjack, sea trout or black bream seared with an improbably hot rod of charcoal.
But it’s when we get beyond the sushi that things really take off including yellowtail with aioli and truffle and a sweet potato hard taco flavoured with sal de gusano – a condiment made from the dried ground red maguey worm more commonly found in bottles of mezcal.
Here is invention and verve, with chef Leo at his best holding forth on food and flavour – especially when those stories are plainly personal.
There’s plentiful freshly ground wasabi too, even in the ice cream served alongside a stunning miso caramel soufflé.
This is a cook unafraid to tame and balance complex flavours.
Tellingly though, my favourite dish is a delicately cut sandwich of wagyu beef seared on Himalayan salt and placed between slices of white bread with wasabi leaves.
It’s a delicious and touching homage to chef Leo’s mother and the lunchboxes she sent him out with as a kid.
This dish honours the gifts of a parent, who should be very proud of the level of skill her son has achieved.
While we’re eating it, nobody mentions the moon.
*** 3/5
key details: Luna Omakase
Luna Omakase is located within Los Mochis’ London City restaurant in Broadgate Circle on the ninth floor.
Food costs £230 per head including service charge.
All drinks are extra including water, sake, wine and non-alcoholic pairings.
Find out more about the restaurant here
Read more: Malaysian restaurant Ong Lai Kopitiam to open its doors at Harbord Square
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