Review: Pham, Barbican

Pham is a little Japanese restaurant, useful to know in the culinary wasteland around the Barbican. It’s nothing special though. One of those very typical UK-Japanese restaurants that offers everything; sushi, tempura, donburi, teppenyaki.

The chicken karaage is okay, a light batter and nice enough chicken within. Their yasai tempura is also pretty good, a whole variety of veggies in a decent tempura batter, crispy covering each piece and not oily. Sushi is pretty good, although the unagi isn’t quite as stickily unctuous as my favourite kind. I quite like the nasu dengaku, the aubergine flesh is cooked to gooeyness and there’s a hefty coating of sticky-sweet miso sauce with sesame on time. You might find it too sweet, I liked it.

The specials don’t work out quite so well. There is a toro (fatty tuna) sashimi with shiitake and jalapeno mayo. This fatty tuna is almost too melt-in-the-mouth, dissolving and leaving a really stringy length of fibre right through it. Love the shiitake though. The other special is eel spring rolls in a jalapeno sauce. There’s not enough eel in the spring rolls for much flavour to come through, it could be anything. And the pool of jalapeno sauce is a sticky-sweet slick of goo that just makes the dish taste like something from a kiddie menu.

I’d come back to Pham for some pre-theatre sushi again, but I’d stick to the UK-Japanese staples and give their specials a miss. The price is fair.