My first day back in London, on the Food and Drink page of The Evening Standard, a headline caught my eye: Keep Jun and Beautiful. Below, a color photograph of -- it has to be said -- a truly dishy Japanese 29-year-old clad in whiter than whites with a long striped apron.
Jun Tanaka was applying a sliver of cold steel to a filet of fish with all the delicacy of a sushi aficionado of many years' hard training. Yet the food he creates owes little to nothing to Japan. As he explained the following Sunday morning, as staffers prepared for lunch, his cuisine is French with a Mediterranean twist.
Tanaka is head chef of Chives, the latest in a group of individual London restaurants served up by the Red Pepper Group. As he explained: "Following on from White Onion, Green Olive and Purple Sage, the owner, who's Iranian and a quite exceptional person, wants to call this Blue Chives, but I'm holding out. Chives are green, right?"