Review

Oyvind Naesheim, executive chef at Nobu Beijing, said he wants to use fermented black beans to add a twist to Beijing's beloved zha jiang mian, thick noodles topped with ground pork stir-fried in the salty, bitter and sweet soybean paste.

But any mention of the word fusion and he'll politely cut you off. He also resents requests for fried rice, uttering "fried rice" in his kitchen is practically forbidden, though he has appeased Jackie Chan's constant appeals for the ubiquitous dish with something called crispy roasted rice.

"He's not going to ask me for that again," Naesheim said last week. So how exactly do you categorize Nobu Beijing?

Is there a need to?

In a restaurant that uses Peruvian sauces, has its base in Japanese food and is looking to stretch into North Chinese cuisine, it's easy to become dizzy trying to place the restaurant into a niche, especially after their yellowtail sashimi topped with cilantro and jalapeno slices in a tart dressing.

But no matter how you label the place, to sit in Nobu Beijing and eat their chicken toban with anticucho sauce or king crab tempura with amazu ponzu is to experience a new Beijing, a life rejuvenated.

After the yellowtail, the first dish in an eight-course meal, came the red snapper sashimi with black sea salt, chili sauce and cilantro. It had a briney sweetness to it that reminded me of raw oysters. Then the chili kicks in, followed by the acid of lemons. It's a fun ride in your mouth.

However, the lobster salad with fried garlic slivers was pedestrian and the wagyu beef gyoza was a disappointment. Despite the initial taste of grilled chopped steak, it seemed a poor counterpoint to the preceding salad.

But the crab tempura was finely executed, with cilantro again, along with paper-thin red onion slices. The dish was tangy and delicate.

Next came the chicken toban in the anticucho sauce. Topped with baby asparagus and mushrooms, the chicken, with skin left on, was served on a sizzling skillet. Anticucho is a popular dish that originated in Peru and consists of grilled, skewered meat. Nobu's version was both sweet and hearty, not unlike a Mexican mole. I couldn't help but think about a simply assembled fajita.

Nobu looks and smells like a bistro, and by that I mean it's not pretentious, though the tables are surrounded by panels that are somewhere between sea urchin spines and an animal cage. Maybe as a nod to its unassuming ambience, the restaurant has a compact and dynamic dessert. It consists of four layers in a cup: a cookie crumble, toffee cream, and ice cream topped with a whisky foam - something else that was hard to categorize.

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