Akasaka - Wolverton

I think it's fairly safe to say Sushi certainly isn't for everyone. It’s not too much a problem for The Child though as we’ve previously seen and I've been itching to get her into Akasaka for ages. I've seen a few of my local foodie friends coming, going, then coming back to Akasaka with rave things to say about the menu so needless to say that I was very intrigued to see how a Japanese restaurant could survive in and around Milton Keynes being in such welcome and individual contrast to the usual style of eats we have around here.

A smallish room, I spent time appreciating the decor while the The Child simply studied the menu ravenously - I liked the clean lines of the place setting, seen here with my Jasmine tea pot (not for the left handers among us).

To get the full sushi experience, we decided to enjoy the delights of a Bento box and so chose two of the three options available with plenty of unpronounceable names and promises of previously unknown delights. You certainly get a lot for your set price lunch money:

All this plus miso soup shown here with a light brown dipping sauce of unknown (but tasty) origin.

The miso soup was light and unmistakably miso-eske. Miso has, what I consider to be, an acquired taste and while I finished mine off, The Child took a couple of mouthfuls and pushed it aside before jumping into her Bento.

She loved the gyoza, nigiri and the rolls (we asked to replace the standard avocado filling with cucumber) and couldn’t get enough of the fish balls or the fried chicken. The Child wasn’t sure about the seaweed salad but I thought it was really tasty and after a couple of flakes of ginger she decided against it.

As we were working our way around each section, we decided that the chicken balls were; ‘super, mega tasty’, followed by the sushi proper; ‘good, especially with the sauce’, the gyoza; ‘crunchy and meaty at the same time’ and the salmon slices; ‘as soft as my skin’ which, in my opinion, is as perfectly soft as you would ever want salmon to be.

Towards the end of the meal as more people had come in and bigger plates started coming out of the kitchen, we started to see other interesting rice and noodle dishes sweeping past, The Child and I had a (very) brief discussion about if we would like to come back to try them. It was an unqualified agreement between us, especially when the bill came out at a nicely affordable £25.

Finally, after scoffing down the last of her cucumber rolls dipped in the mysterious brown dipping sauce, she shared the following piece of zen-like wisdom with me which was (not surprisingly when considered to The Child's usual standard of conversation), totally unconnected to what we were actually eating:

‘Daddy, I love sushi, I really do. But I draw the line at the pink fish eggs which is strange because I normally love pink.’

Wise words my girl, wise words.