Shuko Oda
Shuko Oda
Shuko Oda spent much of her life living between Japan and the UK, making her the perfect person to combine traditional Japanese cooking and seasonal British ingredients at Koya – one of Soho’s most cherished restaurants.
Japanese food is a rich tapestry – as varied and interesting as any food culture in the world – but in the UK, we rarely get to see the totality of it. We’ve fallen in love with certain aspects of over the last few years – rich, porky tonkotsu ramen, picture-perfect sushi and crispy katsu cutlets in curry sauce – but the beguiling depths have gone largely unseen and unexplored. That in part is what makes Koya so special – Shuko Oda’s London restaurant has always stayed true to her Japanese roots, serving up authentic Japanese dishes that would be completely at home in a Tokyo izakaya.
Shuko was born in the United Kingdom but as a child, she moved frequently between London, Tokyo and Los Angeles. ‘My father’s business meant he was transferred often so we went back and forth quite a lot,’ she says. ‘Unconsciously, I think there was always a longing for Japanese life – whenever I was abroad I wanted to eat more Japanese food, read more Japanese books, that sort of thing.’
Some of Shuko’s earliest memories are in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, who would give her little jobs to do whilst they cooked. It would be years before she decided to tackle a career in kitchens, but those early days meant that food was always an important part of her life. ‘I’ve always enjoyed eating and cooking,’ she says. ‘When I was a student in Japan I worked in an Italian restaurant that was near the university. I was waitressing to begin with, but I was always in the kitchen asking the head chef questions – in the end they just made me a chef instead.’
Shuko returned to the UK and completed a degree in Culture Studies, but found her craving for academic studies swiftly replaced by a desire to be back in the kitchen. ‘I just wanted to get back to using my hands, doing something practical that my family could understand better,’ she explains. ‘Food is the ultimate way to say something to someone, I think. You make something with your hands and give it to someone, and they actually eat it!’.
The next few years were busily spent in kitchens, first at Hotel Claska in Tokyo, then at Kunitoraya in Paris. The former grounded her in the Japanese mentality of cooking – treating produce with great respect and creating wholesome, nourishing meals. The latter was, and still is, a beloved Franco-Japanese bistro in the capital’s first arrondissement, and it would become the inspiration for Koya. ‘They (Kunitoraya) helped us a lot at the beginning,’ says Shuko. ‘They were kind of our consultants for the first year. My business partner John used to visit Kunitoraya often – he loved the food and wanted to bring something similar to London. He started talking to myself and Junya (Yamasaki, former head chef of Koya) and we came up with a concept.’
The concept was centred around udon – these fat, chewy noodles were still little-known in the UK at the time, but they’re a central pillar of Japanese cuisine. ‘It’s like rice,’ Shuko explains. ‘You can eat it everyday. Udon is like fast food in Japan – it’s rough and rustic, whereas other noodles like soba are a bit more refined and particular.
‘Ten years ago, there weren’t really any Japanese restaurants – other than sushi restaurants – that specialised in one thing. You’d go to a Japanese restaurant and they would serve soba, udon, ramen, tonkatsu, tempura – everything. It doesn’t do Japanese food justice because that’s not what we are. We wanted to specialise in something and do a really good job of it, so we focused on having great udon and great dashi.’
Koya, then, was a chance for Shuko to shine a light on our idea of Japanese food, and show us what everyday food in Japan is really like. On a foundation of bouncy noodles and aromatic dashi, she built Koya into a beloved Soho institution. London is a notoriously cutthroat restaurant scene – great restaurants come and go in the blink of an eye – but Koya is as busy as it has ever been, with queues regularly snaking out into the street from the door curtain.
The menu features a variety of rice and udon dishes, but it’s the often-changing Koya specials boards that keeps punters coming in every week. This is where Shuko and her team show off a considerable creative streak, using seasonal British ingredients to create a shifting menu of more modern Japanese dishes that venture beyond the udon and dashi. ‘I think increasingly for us, less is more,' she says. 'We are a restaurant in London and the UK – we want to be as local as possible, and that means highlighting the produce we use. Whenever we do tastings of the new specials, I’m always trying to take things off the dish so you can really taste the ingredients. That’s the key thing for us.’
Three things you should know...
The first thing Shuko learned to cook was miso soup.
Shuko loves vinegary flavours, especially pickles. Pickles feature heavily on her menus at Koya.
Shuko's favourite meal of the day is breakfast.
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