YO! Sushi is part of a British sushi and Japanese food chain that has two outlets in Dublin - on Clarendon Street, and in Dundrum Town Centre - and they offer the only sushi trains in the city. A slow-moving conveyor belt snakes around the restaurant, bringing small plates of food to diners who pluck off whatever they like the look of.
Plates are colour- coded, so you pay according to the hue of your platter: green is the cheapest at €2.25 (six small pieces of cucumber roll), moving through half-a-dozen colours up to silver for €6.65 (soft shell crab tempura). The menu has sushi, salads and 30 or so small hot plates.
They recommend five dishes to make a meal - but depending on how you order, the bill can shoot up. Also, if you suffer from eyes-bigger-than-belly syndrome (ahem) you can eat a serious amount in a blink of an eye. There are calorie counts on each plate, so at least you know what you’re putting away.
A new menu launched last month, including popcorn shrimp tempura (€5), six or seven large prawns in a very thick fried tempura batter - more cinema nachos than popcorn - they’re dressed in a creamy miso sauce which is quite sweet, but tastes good with a squeeze of lime. A better dish from the hot menu is the chicken yakitori (€4.50). Skewers pierce tender dark pieces of thigh meat, separated by charred spring onion and covered in a sweet, sticky soy and mirin sauce. A duck and hoi sin salad (€5) has tasty slices of duck breast in hoi sin and sprinkled with sesame seeds, sitting on a salad of mandolined cucumber, slivers of daikon radish, lettuce and red onion.
From the sushi train, there are the usual staples such as spicy tuna mini rolls (€5) or an umami-rich crispy fried salmon skin roll (€2.25): two pieces of maki stuffed with chopped crispy skin wrapped in rice and slivers of spring onion. A tuna tataki and ponzu (€5) has four generous slices of fatty yellow fin seared and coated in pepper, topped with carrot, crispy shallots, chilli and a citrusy ponzu sauce. There’s far too much pepper on this to really work, but a lighter touch and it would be delicious. There are offers to make a visit good value.
All plates on the conveyer on Mondays are €3; a €10 deal gives one blue, one orange and one purple plate plus a water or miso; or you can do all you can eat on Sundays for €20 (with a limited menu).
