Expect handrolls to be rolling onto a menu near you soon
Given the popularity of sushi in London and the wide variety on offer – the gamut runs from £3.50 plates at Yo! Sushi to £420-a-head menus at Sushi Kanesaka – it seems odd that the city’s first dedicated handroll bar only opened in 2021. That was Temaki, a small counter spot inside Brixton Village that we loved for its great quality and great value temaki sets. Owner A.M Dupee, who is relocating the restaurant to a larger central London site this March, sees the “huge potential in the growth of handrolls in the UK”, saying that “handroll bars give operators the ability to give customers the balance of high quality produce in a convivial atmosphere without the price tag of an expensive sushi or omakase meal.”
Handrolls, aka temaki, are made of the same ingredients – nori, seasoned rice, fish – that you’d find in maki sushi, with the differences coming in the preparation and the service. With temaki, the nori is wrapped around the rice, fish and other fillings, forming a cone shape whereas maki is cylindrical, rolled into a tube using a mat. Temaki is handheld, maki is sliced to be eaten with chopsticks.
Many sushi restaurants have a couple of temaki options on their menus and it often features as a course at premium omakase experiences, like the carabineros temaki at ASA Izakaya and the otoro handroll with ponzu and caviar at Juno. Intimate sushi bar Noren, found underneath Chisou in Mayfair, serves makazu sushi, which is like a mini open handroll. There are casual spots like SushiDog and Rolled, which do handheld grab-and-go rolls (essentially uncut maki) in varying sizes. But in terms of dedicated temaki spots, there’s really not that many.
Handroll bar Ukiyo opened in Covent Garden in 2024, with rolls including unagi cucumber, toro uni and salmon avocado crisp on the menu, alongside handroll sets and tasting menu sets that feature sashimi, nigiri and cut rolls too. Temaki bar Romeo San was opened by Yasmine Elghanayan (her family operates Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte) in Marylebone in 2025. “With Romeo San, we wanted to create a simple, counter led handroll experience centred around quality ingredients, fair prices and pace, a concept I had experienced many times in America and genuinely fell in love with,” she says.
So could 2026 be the year that handrolls take over London? Handyman Sushi, a new edomae omakase concept has already done a temaki pop-up at London Fields wine bar Bastardo, using fresh wasabi from Shizuoka, koshihikari rice from Toyama and “very good nori”. Temaki’s new Mayfair site is coming next month and will feature a larger menu of temaki and Japanese small plates. Following a residency at How Matcha at the end of last year, handroll bar Kumori is opening in Soho soon.
Even with those openings on the horizon, we still have a way to go to reach the level of handroll love they have in the US. KazuNori, the first dedicated handroll bar in the country, opened in LA in 2014, before expanding to New York. The Big Apple has since been through its own handroll boom, with the New York Times asking ‘have we reached peak hand roll yet?’ in 2024. Push-up sushi rolls (like a Calippo but with maki), from Suka Sushi, is the latest handheld sushi trend across the pond.
Elghanayan believes we haven’t seen the same trend here because “the UK often adopts specialised dining formats more gradually” but as London gets more expensive, the balance that handroll bars can strike between premium products, price and atmosphere will only become more attractive to diners. With the Wall Street Journal reporting that Gen Alpha’s sushi obsession is costing parents a fortune, maybe more handroll spots are the way to feed kids sushi without having to break the bank?
