Shishamo

The fact that the telephone number on the sign sticking out into the street, and on the glass front window, is at least at least 11 years old (if not more - 0171 phone numbers were replaced with 0207 on the 22nd April 2000!) definitely means that Sakana-Tei is not interested in taking bookings from passing business.  For a Wednesday night, the place certainly had quite a few patrons.  So I guess they don't have to worry about.

Upon entering, you're either welcomed up a few steps, or sent to the basement.  We were assigned the latter - so I never even got a look into the main floor.  I'm assuming this is the more desireable section of the restaurant.  We descended some relatively steep steps and were assigned a table.  The basement is pretty brightly lit with a good 10 or so tables of varying sizes, including some booths.  There's not really a lot of ambience going on here. It's pretty functional.

Croquets

We sat and were served an amuse bouche - a little broth containing daikon, carrot, bamboo.  This was simple and quite tasty indeed.

The specials board contains about 40 items on average - and it's only in Japanese.  So if you want to try something not available on the regular menu, you better bring a friendly translator.

Chirashi don

We ordered some Shishamo to kick off the evening.  Quite the Japanese delicacy - and full of eggs.  Which is a little weird, I must admit.  I left most of this to my better half.

Another "side" of squid, crab and cream croquets.  These were rather overwhelmingly creamy, but the meat textures came through, and the crust was perfectly crispy.

Sushi nigiri special

For mains, Y went for chriashi don, and I the sushi nigiri special.  Unfortunately for me, this is where the meal turned south.  I was around halfway through my sushi selection, when I took a bit of the single piece of flounder.  I found this had a distinctly chemical taste.  So much so that I had to remove it from my mouth.  I'm at a lost to explain what was went on here, it didn't smell off, it looked alright - but that taste was just... scary.  Needless to say, this sort of spoiled my meal.  The rest of the sushi was just ok.  As you can see from the pic, the rolls were poorly put together, and were falling apart on the plate as they were placed in front of me.  The chirasi was seemingly generous, and again, the review was just, ok.  We're still sticking to Atari-ya for regular sushi outings for now it seems.