Oishii London

London deserves a proper Japanese food guide

London has an incredible Japanese food scene, but finding the good places requires sifting through generic review sites where everything gets 4.2 stars and the top results are chain restaurants. Oishii is the opposite: a hand-curated directory where every restaurant is there because it is genuinely worth visiting.

The name means "delicious" in Japanese. The idea is simple: one directory, focused entirely on Japanese cuisine in London, where every listing has been personally vetted. No sponsored placements, no algorithmic rankings: just honest recommendations organised by cuisine type and neighbourhood.

Browse by type, find by area

Restaurants are organised by cuisine type: ramen, sushi, izakaya, omakase, yakitori, udon, and more. Each listing includes a short review, price range, location, and what to order. You can browse by neighbourhood to find somewhere nearby, or explore by category to discover a new favourite.

The directory is updated regularly as new places open and are tested. The goal is quality over quantity: a smaller list of genuinely excellent places is more useful than an exhaustive directory of everything with a Japanese menu.

A guide built on obsession

Japanese food only. This was a deliberate constraint. London has thousands of restaurants and plenty of generic guides covering all of them. Oishii exists because Japanese food is a genuine obsession of mine, not a category I thought would get clicks. The specificity is the point. A guide that only covers Japanese cuisine can go deeper: distinguishing between styles of ramen, explaining the difference between a neighbourhood sushi spot and an omakase experience, knowing that the best udon in London is not where you would expect.

Neighbourhood-based discovery. When you want Japanese food, you usually want it near where you are or in an area you are heading to. Browsing by neighbourhood respects how people actually decide where to eat in London. You are not searching all of London. You are searching Soho, or Shoreditch, or wherever you happen to be on a Tuesday evening.

Curation over listing. This is not a database. It is a recommendation. Every restaurant is there because I think it is worth your time and money. That editorial voice is what separates Oishii from a Google Maps search. A directory tells you what exists. A curated guide tells you what is good. The difference matters when you are spending forty quid on dinner.

What to order, not just where to go. Each listing includes a specific recommendation: what to order when you get there. This is the kind of detail you get from a friend who has been three times, not from a review site. It reduces the anxiety of walking into an unfamiliar restaurant and staring at a menu you do not fully understand.

What a niche food guide teaches you

Passion is obvious and it matters. People can tell when something is built by someone who genuinely cares about the subject versus someone chasing SEO. Oishii works because the love for Japanese food comes through in every listing. You cannot fake that. It is the same reason the best food blogs are written by obsessives, not content farms.

A smaller list is a braver list. Leaving a restaurant out of the guide is a decision. Including it is easy. The discipline of saying "this is good but not good enough for the list" is what gives the guide its value. I learned that the hardest part of curation is not adding things. It is having the conviction to leave things out.

The domain name matters. Getting oishii.london felt like finding the perfect name for a band. It is the Japanese word for delicious, it is a .london domain, and it tells you exactly what the site is about in two words. I learned that a great domain does half the marketing work for you. When people hear the name, they get it immediately.