This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
An editor at one of Britain’s highest-circulation dailies wrote to me last week asking for a piece on “mum guilt”. It was one of those moments when you think “Oh, is that still here?”
Like Love Island and Banksy’s art, the word “literally” and Anna Wintour, perhaps you haven’t checked in for a while, but there they are, doing their thing. Still. Obviously, someone believes there’s a few dregs of interest to be squeezed from “mum guilt”, but, really, must we?
Ditto the “Girls’ Night Out”. Why is this grim phrase still with us? What imaginary domestic bonds are we shaking off, what office-to-bar transformations are we effecting with a cunning statement necklace and a slick of Ruby Woo, what high jinks are to be plotted after three cheeky Cosmos whilst hubby’s dinner is left conscientiously warming in the oven? No one’s been a “girl” since 1996 and besides, someone always cries.
So, the Girls’ Night Out was taking place at OKA on the King’s Road, naturally. I switched seamlessly from office to bar by walking to the bar, to find that OKA does Pan-Asian Fusion, that tenacious culinary revenant that refuses to get laid.
“Fusion” was supposedly coined by Florida chef Norman Van Aken in the late Eighties, as applied to the combination of Florida and Caribbean cooking to form “Floribbean cuisine” (I tried it once at Norman’s in Orlando; it tastes like it sounds), and it has since brought us such joys as the ramen burger or Pad Thai pizza, but fusion is really just what food has always done.
Beyond the strictures of 19th century French haute cuisine, cooks of every place and period have adapted and modified, incorporating new ingredients, emphasising or tamping down flavours, substituting the unavailable for the possible.
Most professional chefs apparently despise the term, but somehow Pan-Asian has clung on, perhaps because almost anything tastes tolerable drenched with enough soy and yuzu, and the Brits still think raw fish is sophisticated.
OKA has six branches in London, and the food is based on the “essence” of Japanese restaurants with influences from Thailand, Vietnam and Korea. It claims to emphasise omotenashi, a traditional Japanese concept of hospitality whose elements are meticulous attention to detail, foreseeing the needs of others and surpassing expectations. They definitely came out strong on the latter; I expected dinner to be vile, but it achieved actively repulsive.
The Girls were raring to go, so they started with a round of house cocktails, which promised Yuzu Watermelon Bliss and Tropical Plum Kisses. I ordered a bottle of Gavi from the three whites available on the seven-item list, which we all ended up drinking whilst they waited for the cocktails.
Perhaps they’ve turned up by now, but that evening the blissful kisses remained ever elusive. After an hour with the Gavi (impressively mediocre for £49) and a single bowl of edamame, our order appeared.
We asked for another bottle, but the waitress pointed out disapprovingly that we’d already had one. Clearly, she had never been on a Girls’ Night Out, but she was eventually persuaded to hand it over, by which time anything that had been hot wasn’t and anything that had been cold was emanating listeria.
Given that the website, the menu with its four variant spellings of “chilly” and possibly the waitress had been generated by Chat GPT, the food shouldn’t have been a surprise.
The batter on the vegetable tempura had slunk away in greasy shame from thick slabs of carrot and courgette, the components of the cauliflower in Korean BBQ sauce with Thai basil yogurt had similarly parted company and the hamachi ceviche with OKA shiso dressing and “chily” was a porridgey puddle of fish paste meticulously ornamented with two green leaves which could have been shiso, or possibly geranium from the window boxes at Ivy Asia a few doors down.
The Yummy roll was not yummy, the Crunchy roll was not crunchy, the salmon sashimi was seared, so not actually sashimi, more over-grilled salmon. Bulgogi beef with onion, edamame and steamed rice might have been fine had there not been that weepy asparagus knocking about in the kitchen; chicken teriyaki katsu was a Bernard Matthews breaded cutlet via chipshop curry sauce, all antibiotics and cornstarch unrelieved by the homemade pickles, which were obviously neither homemade nor, indeed, pickles, as Deirdre discovered when she bit into what she thought was a slice of preserved red pepper.
A raw Birds Eye chillee is not a pickle, but at least the Night Out crying rule was upheld, even if it did ruin her office-to-bar maquillage.
Pan-Asian needs to stop now. It may have been innovative and exciting once but has become an excuse for the worst kind of cynically lazy kitchens. Taking an overlong list of flavourings and having them randomly distributed over cheap protein by underpaid commis chefs is fine for a fast-food chain but not if you purport to be a restaurant.
I’ve only bothered writing about OKA at all to prevent anyone accidentally eating there. Like “mum guilt”, it is an outdated abomination.
OKA, 251 King’s Road, London, SW3 5EL
