ENDO Chelsea: Endo Kazutoshi's 10-seat omakase on Blacklands Terrace
Few autumn openings have London's food obsessives refreshing a waiting list quite like this one. Endo Kazutoshi, whose Endo at The Rotunda in White City was one of the city's most celebrated omakase counters, is opening a new restaurant in Chelsea. It is called simply ENDO, it has just ten seats, and it occupies the Blacklands Terrace townhouse that until recently was home to The Five Fields, a few minutes' walk from Sloane Square and the southern end of Sloane Street.
A difficult year, and a new home
Endo has had a turbulent time. After a fire, he moved Endo at The Rotunda to Annabel's for five months, and he has also been preparing a new Sumi in Marylebone. The Rotunda remains closed, and as Hot Dinners reported, the Chelsea townhouse is set to be his main home for the foreseeable future. Like SUMI and Kioku by Endo, the project is a collaboration with Creative Restaurant Group.
The counter
If the Rotunda felt intimate with 16 seats, ENDO is more so with ten. It is planned as a multi-course omakase, and there will be no menu: guests find out what the chef has prepared as the evening unfolds. The sushi uses locally caught fish, while the nori, wasabi, soy sauce and rice are prepared and imported from Japan specifically for the restaurant. Endo has made repeated trips to Japan to prepare, and the team promises a series of dishes geared towards surprising guests. Not knowing what comes next is exactly the appeal of a counter this small, where every guest watches the chef at work from a few feet away.
Design matters as much as ever. The room, by Javier Villar, who has worked with Endo before, draws on the Tokyo sushi counters of the 1920s and 1930s, the era when Endo's grandfather opened his own restaurant in Yokohama. Its centrepiece is a bespoke counter made from 200-year-old hinoki wood from Kyoto.
Moga, the listening bar upstairs
On the first floor is Moga, a Japanese listening bar with a cocktail list built around teas, developed with help from Postcard Teas, under an undulating ceiling made from masu sake cups. At first it will be open only to diners at ENDO, but from December it is due to take its own bookings, which makes it a promising pre-Christmas plan if a counter seat proves elusive.
How to get in
Reservations are made online through the ENDO Chelsea website, which also runs a waiting list. With only ten seats a night, expect demand to far outstrip supply in the opening months, so sign up early and be flexible on dates. The address is 8-9 Blacklands Terrace, SW3, an easy walk from Sloane Square station and only a little further from Knightsbridge via Sloane Street. For those who want Endo's cooking in the meantime, his other London restaurants remain the place to start, and Hot Dinners has already tipped ENDO as one of the big autumn openings to watch. For more of the best tables nearby, see our Knightsbridge restaurant guide.
Lead image: Dan4th via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
