Inamo

Last night I finally got to try out the much hyped restaurant Inamo. After being ushered into the downstairs bar and reading the menu by the light of our mobiles thanks to the 'mood lighting', we were finally shown to our funky tables. A waitress demonstrated how to use the touch senstitive pads on the table tops, and we immediately started playing. Even though I was starving, I couldn't resist going straight to the ambience settings and changing my table wallpaper to something suitably pink and girly! My friends next to me started having a wallpaper battle, fighting over whether to decorate theirs with stars or pink velvet (the guy wanted pink velvet, the girl wanted galaxy-like outer space images.. go figure!).

The touch pads are relatively easy to use, the same as using a computer to drag a pointer across the table and select dishes from the menu. That said, there was a lot of calling a waiter over to void items ordered by accident and a couple of instances of premature bill requests! A tip for Inamo virgins, as you add items to your order, send them to the kitchen all in one go as opposed to dish by dish, which is what we did. This resulted in some of us finishing our mains before other people had received their starters!

I ordered the sushi to start, wagu beef for my main dish, and mango and sticky rice for dessert. The portions aren't huge and for the price it's quite expensive, but you're paying for the experience more than the cuisine. While you're waiting for your food to arrive (which sometimes took far longer than necessary!) you can watch the kitchen in action using 'chef cam', as well as play games and check out transport options for getting home. Evidently, that wasn't sufficient entertainment for our table, as we all started making animal silhouettes on the table...

In all, I'd say that the restaurant's biggest redeeming feature is the novelty of the touch sensitive tables. The food itself was average, but if you want to impress a date, it's definitely somewhere to go. I'll probably go back again one day, but at £40 a head for 3 courses, it's not exactly cheap!