Alex Craciun is best known, in London at least, for launching British-Japanese restaurant Sosharu for then-boss Jason Atherton in 2016. Though critically well received, the large (probably too large) site closed a few years later, having struggled with its Farringdon location.
Late last year, the Romanian-born chef returned to London to launch his debut solo restaurant project with his greengrocer wife, Aleksandra Jazevica. Opened with little fanfare - partly for budgetary reasons, which we will come to later - it nevertheless deserves to be marked down as one of 2025’s most intriguing restaurant openings.
Aces Foodcraft is not a Japanese restaurant - far from it - but it is influenced by Japanese technique and the country’s wider cooking philosophy. It also uses a number of Japanese ingredients and serves dishes that reference familiar staples, including sushi and ramen.
“Combining fish and rice does not make you a Japanese restaurant. We are not Roka or Zuma, and nor do we want to be,” says Craciun, who - despite Sosharu having closed some eight years ago - is still struggling to shake off his reputation as a western chef who cooks Japanese food.
“It’s not a label I like,” he continues. “I was very keen to learn about Japanese food ahead of launching Sosharu and staged in some great restaurants in Tokyo and Koyoto, but there’s a lot more to my cooking than just that. I’m interested in, and have an understanding of, lots of different cuisines.”
Dropping off the radar
Craciun might have dropped off the radar since Sosharu closed, but he has kept himself busy - very busy, in fact - consulting on and launching restaurants all over the world, in locations including the Middle East, Bali, Singapore, Spain, Italy and his native Romania.
That experience, he says, has left him well placed to launch a restaurant that does something new and largely defies easy categorisation in terms of cuisine.
“We don’t want to be crazy just for the sake of it, but we do want to create new things. That’s very difficult, because everything has been done before. Our experience travelling has been invaluable because it has exposed us to new ideas and changed the way we develop dishes - everything, from the kitchen set-up and the way chefs are trained to the produce itself, is totally different,” he says. “There are some fantastic chefs in London, but a lot of places are serving the same things, or variations on the same things.”
While Aces Foodcraft aims to create dishes that will become signatures, Craciun intends for around 70% of the tasting menu to change every month or so.
A chef-greengrocer double act
Another factor that sets Aces Foodcraft apart is the creative dynamic between Craciun and his wife, who is a director at high-end produce supplier Primeur. Jazevica has input into every ingredient on the menu and how it is handled, bringing her sourcing expertise to bear to ensure a steady stream of top-quality produce into the restaurant. Ingredients are shown off in a temperature-controlled display cabinet mounted above Aces Foodcraft’s open kitchen.
Her enviable connections also give Craciun access to produce that has been rejected by other top-end restaurants. “We got 20 amazing pineapples the other day at a great price because they weren’t quite the right shape for what another restaurant wanted to do with them,” he says. “Many top kitchens still insist on everything being the same. I like taking that sort of thing because it forces creativity. We made a pineapple carpaccio dish and a fermented pineapple drink for our soft drinks menu. We benefit from other restaurants being fussy.”
Aces Foodcraft’s £95 tasting and à la carte menu blends a wide range of influences. Dishes include a deep-fried prawn dumpling served atop a test tube of bright green mussel sauce; a fish-and-rice dish that sits somewhere between a taco and a temaki; and a clever take on ramen, with noodle-like strips of mushroom suspended in a powerful, mushroom-based sauce.
“We don’t want to be tied to any particular style of cuisine or cooking,” says Craciun. “I love Korean food, I love Japanese food, I love Chinese food and I love French food. We cook what tastes good and what makes sense.”
Rethinking lunch
Partly because of his experience at Sosharu - which closed in part because it struggled to fill tables at lunchtime - Craciun is pragmatic about lunch. Next month, he will introduce a menu that can be executed by just one or two chefs, while the rest of the team prepares for the evening service.
“We will never offer a tasting menu at lunch. Lunch is very difficult in London,” he says. “At Aces Foodcraft it will be fast and fun. We will offer five or so dishes maximum, and it will be affordable.”
Craciun’s hero dish is his take on pressed sushi, which he has been developing over the past few years. Ingredients are layered into a custom mould and gently pressed, before being cut into pieces roughly the size of nigiri.
“It sounds easy, but our approach is complex. There are lots of layers, including fish, meat, vegetables, sauces and, of course, mirin. We change the combinations to create lots of different variations. It’s totally non-traditional - we season our rice with coconut fat, orange reduction and mirin. It’s loosely based on something I saw in Kyoto, but it’s our own take. It’s like sushi on steroids.”
Eight years in the making
Aces Foodcraft has been eight years in the making, with Craciun and Jazevica first discussing the idea for the restaurant – named after their son, Ace – around the time Sosharu closed its doors. The pair have spent much of the past decade sourcing tableware and objects from the countries they have travelled to, stashing them under every available piece of furniture in their tiny London flat.
The restaurant’s unusually long gestation period is partly down to very specific property criteria - the site needed to be small, on one level and of the right (square) shape to have a kitchen right in the middle, which put the pair in direct competition with coffee shop operators - but mainly reflects their decision to do everything themselves.
“We want to create something special and, for us, that means having 100% control,” says Craciun. “We want to be free to make sure our guests have the best experience. We don’t want anyone telling us to put prices up or down, or to change this or that. We don’t want to have to justify our decisions to anybody.”
It has taken time for the pair to save for the not-insubstantial cost of opening a restaurant in a relatively prime part of central London – Aces Foodcraft sits opposite Motorino, just off Mortimer Street on Pearson Square. Once the site was secured, the fit-out also took longer than expected, with the restaurant originally slated to open last summer.
“It’s hard to make things happen quickly when you have limited capital,” Craciun explains. “In some ways we are opening before we are ready. The restaurant is not quite as we want it to be – we want to source more art and create more storage space for the team – but we had bills to pay, so we had no choice but to launch when we did.”
“We are probably opening it five years too late. It’s very hard to run a restaurant in central London now. But we will make it work.”