Tosa, East Finchley

Tiny Japanese restaurant that must not be allowed to become popular. Ignore this review and never go there.

Now I am no connoisseur of Japanese food. I can barely hold a pair of chopsticks between my fat, pudgy, sausage-like fingers, let alone summon up the nimble dexterity needed to employ them. But, more importantly - and I have to let you into a little embarrassing secret here - I don't eat rice. Cannot stand the stuff. It's a hangover from really bad school food that has persisted into my adult life, despite the occasional attempt to introduce it into my diet. The only time I've ever eaten more than a forkful of rice willingly was a strawberry risotto from the now sadly defunct asian fusion restaurant Reform in Edinburgh, and even that most un-rice like rice was a trial. So sushi, nigiri, maki - all of these concepts are as foreign to me as the words themselves.


So as I walked through the door into a cramped room that probably seats 25 people at most, and none of them particularly comfortably, I was expecting a relatively limited choice of foodstuffs on which to gorge myself. Imagine my delight, then, upon discovering that about a 1/4 of the floor space is given over to a large grill on which a chap was tending a quite considerable amount of meat on skewers. If there's one thing that I do understand, it's meat, especially if it's grilled and on a stick. To be fair, Tosa does have a lot more to offer. There are lot of rice-based dishes available, plenty of noodle soups, a decent smattering of sashimi. But by far the most arresting part of the menu is that which deals with products of the grill, which is happily the speciality of the house.


My avoidance of rice does not extend to products made from rice, so lashings of hot sake are very much the order of the day. Sake, when taken in my preferred quantity, induces loss of memory, so I cannot recall the options in their entirety, but I'll give it a bloody good go. Butabara - very simple - pork belly. Nothing else. Pork belly. Roll it in a tiny bit of soy. It is LUSH. Torikawa - chicken skin with salt. Ditto. Kamonegi - succulent duck with spring onion. Shisomaki - juicy, juicy loin of pork with shiso leaf. Uzura bacon - quail eggs wrapped in pork. Sakekama - cheek of salmon. Hotate - scallops. Tebasaki - chicken wing tips. Ox tongue with salt and lemon. Shiitake. Onion. The list keeps going and all of it, to the very last morsel, tastes amazing.


I've a particular liking for the staff as well. They're attentive without being smothering, they keep the sake coming, and they delight in the fact that the fat Englishman orders more skewers every time he comes. Last time round, he did fifteen. Fifteen skewers of food. Admittedly, the skewers aren't huge, but fifteen is still gluttonous overkill and provokes squeals of amusement from the waitresses. My companion, a Greek whose liking for meat equals mine, matched the fifteeen; we washed it all down with about half a litre of sake each, and finished off with two scoops of ice cream - green tea and a particularly refreshing chestnut. So refreshing, in fact, that it was tempting to dip back into the grill menu. All of this and a bill for under £100.


In all honesty, if I could only ever eat at one restaurant for the rest of my life, I'd probably choose Tosa. It doesn't provide the most refined fare, it's scruffy and mildly uncomfortable, and it's a little out of the way. But the tastes - oh my God, the tastes. Hopefully it's out of the way enough to ensure that I'll always have a seat should I turn up on the hoof. Stay away, do you hear me? Stay away. There's nothing for you here.