Despite its prime location in the famed Japanese village on Soi 13, one doesn’t hear the name Akune bandied about much compared to its neighbors. And that’s too bad because this non-descript restaurant is quite a bargain.
On the second floor above Gotto Retto, the restaurant is small with a sushi bar and less than 10 tables with pits to hang your legs in. The no-frills dining area is filled wholly with Japanese salarymen who let their hair down to enjoy lingering dinners over bottles of shochu.
The menu is written in Japanese with English karaoke-style pronunciations of each dish, but no descriptions in English or Thai. If you can’t decipher the menu, fret not. The waitresses are ready to save you from the lost-in-translation moment and help sort out kamo (duck) from kyuri (cucumber) and buta (pork) from biru (beer).
With a selection of familiar sushi and sashimi, Akune also offers a wide variety of Japanese drinking food. We love Akune for its big heart: the prices are pocket-friendly and the portions are relatively generous. But as is often the case with izakaya (“drinking restaurants”), the cooking can be patchy. Since the emphasis here seems to be on quantity rather than quality, subtleties and attention to details that make the simple-yet-complex Japanese cuisine such a luxury are missing.
The hearty nigiri sushi set, which includes fancy toppings like grilled eel and salmon roe, would have been a great-value, ultimate sushi fix. Unfortunately, the rice was heavy with vinegar, making it mushy and completely overwhelming the flavor of the toppings—though this may have been by design. You take your chances with the quality of the raw seafood. The fish in an assorted sashimi moriawase set can vary from ultra-fresh salmon to disappointing maguro (tuna) that feels dead on the tongue.
That being said, Akune has a lot of high points to it. The kitchen does an impressive job with grilled and fried dishes. Our favorites are salmon teriyaki cooked to perfection with thin-but-crisp skin and tofu tosaage, a comfort dish with crunchy deep-fried tofu simmered in konbu broth and topped with grated white radish and ginger. Another winner was aigamo hooba yaki—tender slices of duck bathed in miso sauce served on a charcoal grill pan.
Smoking is allowed in the dining room. So if you want to enjoy the fresh(er) cuts of raw fish in a smoke-free atmosphere, join the Japanese housewives at lunch and opt for Akune’s good-value lunch sets.
