Tenshi, England by Bureaucrat

After shopping on Upper Street near Angel tube one day...


we decided to have lunch at Tenshi.


For entrees, we ordered the vegetable gyoza. Very tasty, but it was a bit too fried, as just some bits of the dumplings were blackened.


We also tried the deep fried octopus, which was delectable. Crisp batter, fresh, good-sized pieces of octopus.


For mains, I got the okonomiyaki, the cabbage-based pancakes with added octopus. I haven't had okonomiyaki prepared like this before. Most places back in Melbourne serve this as quite a hearty (even, stodgy) pancake. Here it was like a matrix of thinly sliced cabbage, which was lightly fried but crispy. There wasn't any flour added to the dish to bulk it up. There were only a couple of pieces of octopus in the pancake, and I was hoping that there would be more. It was served with katsuobushi (dried, fermented fish shavings) which gave the dish an even more savoury finish.

The Lawyer had originally ordered unagi don (grilled eel on rice), however, when they served my dish, the waiter informed him that the kitchen had run out of rice(?!). I don't why they couldn't have told us earlier, or being a business, would have ensured that they had a ready supply of key ingredients.

We asked whether they could serve the unagi on noodles, but was told that the kitchen couldn't do that (I have no idea why that seemed like an impossible task). A bit annoyed, the Lawyer quickly ordered the king prawns with udon.


A big bowl of udon in miso soup. The prawns were decent sized for London standards, and it came with some seaweed. The dish was good, but it wasn't anything special that you'd rave about.

Overall
Tenshi is a reasonable Japanese place. Aside from the glitch with the unagi don, the service was okay. The entrees were definitely the better dishes. While Tenshi was reasonable, however, next time I'm in the area I would try a different restaurant.

Address
Tenshi
61 Upper Street
Angel N1 0NY
Telephone: (020) 7226 4655