Readers of my blog will know that Mr. A and I love Japanese food, so it seemed appropriate to book dinner in Yamazato, the 1 star Michelin restaurant within the (Japanese) Okura Hotel following our visit to the “Van Gogh and Japan” exhibition in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum.  And we had enjoyed lunch in Yamazato in the Okura Prestige Bangkok six months earlier.

When we arrived the hotel seemed almost deserted, but the restaurant was quite full and rather noisy. It didn’t have the feel or ambience of a Michelin starred restaurant at all, nor indeed of a Japanese fine dining restaurant.  Rather than pale natural wood, there was cheap-looking veneer glossily varnished everywhere. Waitresses dressed in Kimonos buzzed about, but it took a while for them to offer us a menu to read.  We chose to have the “AOI Kaiseki” menu at €125 each.  We didn’t go for the wine and sake flight, preferring to drink draught beer.  For those unfamiliar with the word, Kaiseki is a traditional multi-course Japanese style of dining which always follows the same format of: appetiser, sushi, sashimi, a steamed dish, then a fried dish (usually tempura), a grilled dish, then rice and pickles with miso soup at the same time, and finally a dessert.

While we waited for the food to arrive we checked out the Japanese garden through the large windows. It was “pleasant”, but nowhere near Japanese horticultural standards: they used grass instead of moss, the koi pond was very dirty and the fish invisible.  It certainly wasn’t good enough to hold our attention for the 45 minutes we had to wait for any food to arrive in front of us!  Such a wait would be totally unacceptable and unimaginable in Japan and I felt very sorry for the waitresses, who were all Japanese (which is never the case in British Japanese restaurants).

Our first dish was smoked bamboo shoot with scallop, shiitake and a pepper puree. A cold dish, its flavours and techniques were reminiscent of Japan, but the smoked bamboo dominated everything else. 6/10. Next was another cold dish of steamed vegetables with a sesame sauce and a small piece of king crab. The flavour of the crab was totally lost. 5/10

We then had to face another 15 minute wait for the third appetiser, which was another cold dish (so why the wait?).  This was a single piece of shrimp sushi incongruously wrapped in a banana leaf, with a smoked salmon roule and a couple of plump peeled bread beans. This was the first dish which actually tasted quite nice 7.5/10

Dish four was the first warm dish, and we had to wait another 15 minutes for it to appear. It was a nice enough pea soup with a floating fried tofu, clam and bamboo shoot ‘cake’.  The cake was wet and most uninspiring. 4.5/10

Next up was the sashimi selection of maguro (standard tuna), toro (fatty tuna belly), yellowtail, sea bream, squid with sea urchin, and a selection of sauces.  They also gave us a glass of sake on the house because of the very slow service. The sashimi, usually my favourite part of the meal, was no better than “OK” 6.5/10. When we’d finished this course we had been in the restaurant for two hours and bizarrely (and annoyingly) ten minutes later they told us the next course takes ten to fifteen minutes to make!!

And so it was, 20minutes after we finished the sashimi we were served half a grilled spiny lobster “from Brazil” with a mushroom tempura.  With big blue lobsters in the  North Sea just a few miles beyond the polders and dykes why on earth would a chef choose to import an inferior animal all the way from Brazil? And then over-cook it and serve it with a horrible version of tempura which tasted of oil?! 2/10

We were aghast when the restaurant manager to whom we’d been complaining about the slow service the asked us if we would like a gap before the next course!  “no, no, no!” we both said in unison.  But still it was another 35 minutes before we got our beef (5/10 for its tenderness), but they did at least give us a glass of red wine on the house. The beef dish came on a pretty ceramic cube with burning charcoal inside, but I had to quickly remove the beef from it before it became overdone.

The rice dish was served with eel, which we both love, as well as Japanese pickles, and the miso soup was made with a good dashi broth, but strangely it contained lots of stewed celery 7/10.  And then they once again asked us if we wanted a break before the next course!

Dessert was a pretty combo of tea panna cotta with black and white sesame ice cream, which was actually not that bad.  But by this time it was far too late to rescue this below average menu and the frightful service.  I simply can’t believe that Japanese staff in a Japanese hotel can be content to provide such un-Japanese service standards and food.  Shame on them!

Overall 3/10 and for the first time in my life in Europe I didn’t leave a tip (in Japan one never tips, so at least I was being authentic!).  In Japan it’s not uncommon to complete a meal in a 3 star restaurant in an hour.  This meal took 3 hours 45 minutes.