Shumi a shared experience

It's getting harder and harder to think of something new to launch into the restaurant world these days. The UK now produces numerous fine examples of French cuisine, but it's hardly a novel concept. Meanwhile, Italian and Indian cooking have become practically more British than steak and kidney pie, and food inspired by the Arab world is healthily represented by the cuisine of Morocco to Iran. Even East Asian food - the final food frontier, some might say - has been embraced by the restaurant-going public with unmitigated enthusiasm.

So what next? Do what the fashion designers do, of course: take influences from wherever best pleases you and create a hybrid. Fusion food was the beginning of this idea, but now Jamie Barber and Geoffrey Moore (son of Roger), creators of Hush, have taken it one step further and created Shumi.

Shumi is a hybrid of Italian and Japanese. Some of it looks Japanese, you eat your food with chopsticks from numerous shared dishes, but close your eyes, and it's all about Italy. Modern Italy, that is.

The idea sprung out of a trip to Italy, where Barber was fortunate enough to sample the food of chef Moreno Cedroni. One year and more than £1m later, Shumi is about to open (on 22 October) in what was formerly Che in St James's. It's a 150-capacity ground-floor bar and 85-seat first-floor restaurant, centred on a carpaccio bar much akin to a traditional sushi bar.

If your initial reaction to this idea is that it all seems a little bit faddish, a passing trend to be embraced in the autumn but discarded by the time the spring collection emerges along with the snowdrops, Barber and Moore are keen to persuade you otherwise.

"Very few people go to a restaurant without tasting their companion's food," Barber enthuses. "Everyone likes to share dishes, but food has become stuck within the boundaries of a starter, main course and dessert. The concept of sharing your dishes is not faddish, we've just made a feature out of it."

What about the chopsticks? Surely that's a bit of a gimmick? Moore's positive it isn't. "The food is presented in a Japanese style because we didn't want to do what everyone else does," he says. "Sticking your fork into a shared bowl is not the most hygienic way of eating, but with chopsticks it becomes more elegant."

The idea is novel but it seems appropriate from a partnership that set out to create successful restaurants from the perspective of what they personally like to eat, rather than from a restaurateur or cheffing background. Hush, just off Bond Street, the pair's first venture into the restaurant world under startup company Steamroller Restaurants, may now be a fashionable hangout which caters for about 1,000 guests a day, but it was met with some degree of scorn when it opened with murmurs of "two little rich boys" more than audible.

"I can see why people said Hush would never work," Barber admits. "We had no real experience in the industry and we set out to attract such an eclectic group of people that it seemed impossible. Hush is a fantastic product, but we were still doing the groundwork after opening. With Shumi it has taken a year but we've got it right. I learnt from Hush that you can never under-plan, but it has taken so much work."

"We've never really been taken that seriously," Moore agrees. "Now we know that we have to be twice as good as everyone else and we're even being called the new Jeremy [King] and Chris [Corbin].

That's not to say that either Moore or Barber have entirely distanced themselves from the world of celebrities, music and general bling bling. (Moore formerly worked on a "very short-lived but fruitful" music contract with Mike and the Mechanics, while Barber worked on a musical project with George Michael). Shumi's chef's table is the only place in the country to serve every vintage of Cristal Champagne from 1980 onwards.

If Hush was about providing a restaurant centred on lifestyle with the emphasis more on atmosphere and experience than haute cuisine, food is the firm focus of Shumi. Barber and Moore, it would seem, are now far more comfortable in their status as restaurateurs and confident enough to invest in a venture that is not just about location and lifestyle.

"Food is the celebrity at Shumi," Moore enthuses. "We always wanted three central London restaurants but we've kept growth quite steady and ensured that the concept came before location or anything else."

Shumi is certainly heavy on concept - even the name has complex origins. The "sh" apparently comes from the end sound of Hush and they've added "mi" for the Italian indirect pronoun for "I" - ie, me. You can make whatever you want out of that explanation, but apparently inspiration also came from a James Bond character named Tumi who invites Bond for a swim au naturel in The Man with the Golden Gun.

All in all, Shumi is one of those things that's either going to appeal to you, or isn't. Barber and Moore are confident that most will agree with one critic who decided a certain dish of porcini was "life-enhancing" at a recent pre-tasting, and are already planning expansion of the concept to New York next summer.

Oh, and if you hadn't already noticed - Hush is just off Bond Street and Shumi on St James's. Bond, James - Geddit?

Shumi

23 St James's Street, SW1A 1HA
Tel: 020 7747 9380
www.shumi-london.com
www.shumi-newyork.com

Design

The interiors at Shumi were brought to us courtesy of Keith Hobbs at United Designers. Moore and Barber were not overly forthcoming but apparently we can expect a colour palate of pink, cream and aubergine. Meanwhile the building, formerly home to Che, is a 1960s listed affair, complete with an elevator through the centre and listed tiling.

Menu selection

Carpaccios Carpaccio of Aberdeen Angus, mustard mayonnaise and spicy breadcrumbs, £7
Bresaola of tuna with fava beans, pancetta and Planeta olive oil, £7

Tartares Salmon tartare with caviar, £12
Veal tartare with capers, £9

Salads Roman artichokes with salted lemon, honey and almonds, £8
Shumi salad, £9

Shumi appetisers Fried quail eggs "sunny side up" with white alba truffle, £12
Scallop chip and caponata, £10

Scodellina Rice flour spaghetti with white tomato sauce, £5
Rice flour rigatoni cavalo nero and chilli pancetta, £5

Shumi main dishes Cio-cio beef tenderloin with balsamic sauce, £19
Chargrilled sea bass with spiky artichoke, £18

Side dishes Confit vine tomatoes, £4

Shumi desserts Pear and fig crostata with honey ice-cream, £6
White peaches and strawberries, £6

Food's the celebrity

With such celebrity ownership, Shumi is bound to become a place to be seen. But the main draw - and this is something that Barber and Moore want as much as anyone - will be its food.

The man responsible for all things culinary is 32-year-old Lee Purcell, formerly of London restaurants Sonny's, Daphne's, Sartoria and Artigiano in Belsize Park, who spent his formative years under the tutelage of North-west chef John Benson-Smith.

While Barber was working up the idea for Shumi, he became aware of Purcell's reputation for producing authentic Italian cuisine at Artigiano. "Jamie knew I was looking for a move and came to eat in the restaurant," Purcell says. "He took the most traditional, simplest dishes on the menu and seemed impressed with the quality."

Purcell joined the team two months ago and has been spending his time tucked up in the top floor kitchen of Hush with his brigade of 15 (soon to rise to 20). His kitchen at Shumi, meanwhile, will be situated in the basement of the restaurant and sport a 10-seat chef's table, overlooking the pass. A separate team of one sous chef and two larder chefs will be positioned on the carpaccio bar during service.

The food concept at Shumi is quite difficult to sum up and I look forward to the restaurant critics having a try. It's not Italian sushi, as it was first dubbed, but Italian produce (from all regions of Italy), served in an Oriental format (ie, shared dining).

What Purcell did, once Barber and Moore had put the idea to him, was develop a style of food that was light and clean, using the best Italian produce he could get hold of and present it in a refined fashion.

So while there's undoubtedly an Italian technique here, a Japanese influence there, it also has a touch of the Thomas Keller about it - everything is at its ultimate freshness, beautifully presented and the emphasis is all on flavours. "That was the brief I gave myself," Purcell says, "I wanted to go for smaller portions, but intense flavours and really well-presented food."

Purcell says he has consciously spent the past 10 years of his career stripping his food down to the bare ingredients. "But the simpler the food, the harder the cooking is because you're leaving yourself no room for error. You have nothing to hide behind. You're concentrating solely on the quality of the cooking, the quality of the ingredients and then the quality of the execution of the service."

So what's on the menu? There's an abundance of Mediterranean fish, vegetables sourced directly from Italy, meats (beef, however, is from Scotland) and pastas, but not your average pasta. Shumi will be serving rice flour pasta, which is much lighter than semolina pasta. Once cooked, it has far more bite to it than pasta and is a lot less heavy, but sauces still coat it in the same way as traditional pasta.

"I'm very pleased with this product, but I'm also very conscious of the fact that there's a difference between the pasta made with semolina and pasta made from rice flour. If you want to compare it to traditional pasta, you can't, it's just not the same, but I think it's going to create a fantastic talking point," Purcell says.

Purcell has gone away from the traditional antipasti, pasta and main-course sections on the menu and introduced carpaccios, tartares, salads, Shumi appetizers, scodellina (bowl food), Shumi main dishes, side dishes and desserts instead.

What's not on the menu is bread. And, no, this isn't because Barber and Moore have been outed by the Atkins diet movement, but because Barber wants to move away from the tradition of guests being hit by a breadbasket the minute they walk through the door.

While there will be a great deal of raw fish and meats on the menu, Purcell says that he can't lay claim to creating something new here. "Carpaccios are found on menus all over the place, so are tartares, but what we have done is to dedicate whole sections of the menu to them and because the theme of the food is light, you won't see a carpaccio on the menu with an osso buco or a risotto listed underneath it.

"I don't think we're the first to bring the sharing experience of cooking to London. We've taken a look at the likes of Nobu, Hakkasan and Zuma and seen the pleasure of eating that's conveyed to diners. That's what's missing from the restaurants that cater for the fine-dining market - there's no fun.

"And the funny thing is it that when I got together to explain the concept to my chefs, I found it hard to explain because half of them are Italian and sharing has always been part of their dining experience at home. So for them, it wasn't a case of what we're doing is something new here, it's ‘we're going to bring enjoyment to eating'. Shared experiences bring the food to another level, something that you're all concentrating on and talking about equally. If something tastes really good, to fight for that last one is fun."