Fortification for salarymen

Experience (multiple visits) continues to suggest that Sushiya remains Edinburgh’s best Japanese restaurant. I am especially partial to their vegetable tempura which, at its best, comes as a work of art with crispy batter clinging to the vegetable in pendant, alien forms. I confess it wasn’t quite so artistic on our visit last week – no strange branches of batter at improbable angles - but it still tasted as good. Shame that our sushi rice was a little tired, and had probably been around for a while, but everything else was lovely.

Japanese-style eggplant came marinated in soy, ginger, spring onion and bonito flakes. Absolutely delicious, even if it needed to warm up a little, as it came fridge cold. The marinade gave me a very vivid taste memory of Boston’s stellar Japanese restaurant O Ya.

Grilled ox-tongue skewers came with a peppery marinade, and a slice of lemon. The marinade was spot-on; the lemon was a mistake, as the lemon juice rather swamped the surprisingly light flavour of the meat. I am sure ox tongue isn’t always so chewy, but it tasted good and I don’t consider the texture to have been a problem.

A bowl of their traditional ramen, the heart of our meal, comes steaming and full of goodies, including bean spouts, bamboo shoots (surprisingly sweet), half an egg, pork (which has been in some kind of sweet marinade) and of course the ramen noodles themselves, in a beige broth tasting of miso and egg. This hearty kind of food, a defence against the ferocious northern Japanese winter, is the counterpoint of the image of Japanese cuisine as being composed of sculpted, precious little cuts of raw fish on miniature roundels of rice. 

We’ve had a lot of fun in the last couple of years learning about sake. Sushiya doesn’t give one much choice in the matter, since sake culture has yet to reach Edinburgh (unlike London, where it can feel there is nary a street without a Japanese restaurant, and sake lists can be very developed). The Hakushika Ginjo is a fairly low-end sake, frankly a little rough, short on the palate, with slight (fairly typical) notes of melon and cucumber. But every sake lover has to start somewhere, and for the time being, this is what there is in Edinburgh.

Dessert was green tea ice cream, matcha-heavy and not too sweet. Lovely.  

Sushiya does really look the part; I’ve never been to Tokyo, but the narrow room with high tables, barstools, TV playing unsubtitled Japanese TV and a counter behind which you can see sushi getting prepared correspond exactly to how I imagine a noodle bar ought to look. It’s small, cosy and sometimes steaming. You wouldn’t want to linger here; it feels more like a fast-turnover sort of place that, in Japan, would be fortifying salarymen against another epic shift in the office.