][1]As we noted in the 5pm blog last week, Yo! Sushi planned to open its fourth Scottish branch in Edinburgh’s Harvey Nichols last night. We whizzed up in the lift to the Forth Floor (geddit?) at around 7pm and the place was buzzing with happy sushi fiends and busy kitchen ninjas.
If, like me, you can safely list greed as one of your character flaws, then Yo! is a dangerous place to be. As you all know, the restaurant is based around an open kitchen surrounded by a table top conveyor belt. Customers sit around the kitchen and pick passing dishes off the belt. It’s fine if you have an iron will but rather more risky if you have all the self restraint of a footballer in a strip bar.
Among many other things, we ate some silky salmon sushi and sashimi, a crispy duck roll, a very more-ish seaweed, edamame and carrot salad; some beautiful tuna loin, crunchy katsu breaded chicken with a fruity sauce and hairy prawns which are prawns wrapped in what tasted like hot shredded wheat.
The one thing that is perhaps an acquired taste were the mochi or glutinous rice cakes. Imagine trying to eat one of the spectres from Ghostbusters and you wouldn’t be far off.
It was all lip-smacking fresh and rather fun. Harvey Nick’s looks like a clever place to open. It’s easy to imagine shoppers stopping off for just a couple of plates of sushi and a glass of something cold and then leaving three hours later in a happy sashimi daze.