Koizen is a restaurant offering tasting menus based on excellent quality sushi, prepared by a passionate and extremely friendly chef.

For dinner in Gothenburg, I put Koizen at the top of my list for one simple reason: it’s the restaurant that took over from Kuruya, an izakaya bar that I really liked in the past. In fact, the restaurant was historically a sushi restaurant, but they tried the izakaya formula, which wasn’t a real commercial success, so it returned to its roots.

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Restaurant concept

It’s a Japanese restaurant that offers tasting menus based on the ‘omakaze’ concept, which means that the chef constantly varies the menu according to his inspiration and the ingredients available. If I remember correctly, it means ‘trust,’ which perfectly sums up the concept.

The setting

The restaurant consists of a small room with a counter where you eat facing the chef who prepares the dishes and serves them directly.

The menu

That’s the problem… it changes every day and I’ll have a hard time remembering all the explanations from the chef, who I think was thinking in Japanese and translating into English via Swedish… besides, the names of the fish were often a mixture of both languages and pronounced so quietly that I couldn’t understand everything.

In short, don’t be surprised if some elements of the meal that follows are a little unclear…

The meal

I arrive at an empty restaurant (there will ultimately be three customers for this service) and am greeted very warmly.

I am brought an oshibori and asked if I would like an aperitif.

I’ll have a yuzu cocktail, which will be nice.

Meanwhile, the chef gets ready and starts preparing the first dishes.

Here comes the starter. An oyster with ponzu sauce, yellowtail, and a fish whose name I can’t remember, served with cucumber pickles.

The oyster is delicious and well seasoned, the yellowtail is nicely enhanced by horseradish, and the cucumber is well balanced, complementing the third fish without masking its flavour.

Next, ikura with rice and prawns.

Very good and excellent combination of flavours between the rice, vinegar, prawns and an ingredient that gives it a smoky aftertaste.

I can’t remember the next dish, but it was a spicy fish with yuzu and a peppery vinaigrette.

Once again, a perfect balance of flavours.

Then I’ll remember a few things: perch with marinated olives, pickled mackerel with vinegared rice, sea bass, scallops with truffles, langoustines with spicy yuzu mayonnaise, grilled eel…

I won’t go into detail about each dish for the reasons mentioned above, but everything was really refined and surprising, and even dishes that are generally divisive, such as mackerel and eel, were very much to my liking.

And we finish with a perfectly cooked and perfectly textured pan-fried sea bass.

And for dessert, a white cheese and yuzu cake with strawberry ice cream.

A somewhat incomplete and disjointed article, but ultimately a delicious meal and a restaurant that I can only recommend.

The service

The chef and waitress are a perfect and very pleasant duo. He explained each dish at length (even if not everything was audible) and gave me lots of details about Japanese cuisine. We also talked about many topics, including his son who is doing an internship at a Michelin-starred restaurant, and continued our conversation for a long time while I enjoyed a whisky after dinner.

The atmosphere

Very quiet and cosy.

Bottom line

It was truly an excellent experience that this article does not do justice to. I would gladly do it again.

Final bill: £170 including aperitif, digestif, menu and sake pairing.

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