Restaurant review: Sushi star of the show in Skibbereen spread
TokYou Sushi Skibbereen Joe McNamee restaurant review
- TokYou Sushi, Bridge St, Skibbereen (also available from neighbourfood.ie and other outlets in West Cork) Tel. 087 297 1975. tokyousushi.ie
- Kalbo’s, North Street, Skibbereen Tel. (028) 21515. kalbos.ie
- O’Neill’s, Townshend St, Skibbereen. oneillcoffee.ie
Wonderful West Cork may justly be viewed as a place apart and so it is the starting point for gradually expanding explorations over coming weeks in search of fine fare for ‘dining out at home’ — for there is nothing like a blissfully full belly to bring a little much-needed joy into our lives.
On a sunny day in late January, we join a socially distanced queue outside O’Neill’s, a former grocery store now rendered as a delightful and immensely stylish little coffee shop. It is a tremendous and comparatively recent addition to the town. With the charming ante-rooms temporarily shuttered, one customer allowed at a time, it feels perfectly safe and coffees are truly excellent (Tony Speight’s superb West Cork Coffee beans).
For years, Kalbo’s traded as a highly popular local cafe/restaurant with a cracking in-house bakery. But, with the arrival of The Covid, a venue this small was incapable of surviving, even when socially distanced interior dining returned last summer, for you’d be hard-pressed to squeeze a cat into the bijou little space let alone take to swinging it around the room. Pivoting with aplomb, Kalbo’s is now a deli, offering soups, sandwiches, salads, pre-cooked dinners, a very smart range of specialty food products, and some considered wine selections. We load up on supplies, including a surfeit of ‘covid comforts’ from the dedicated ‘chocolate table’.
Piotr Wojakowski, a fully-qualified chef, manned the fish counter in Field’s supermarket for 12 years, building a sterling reputation for his gorgeous fish platters. In January 2020, before The Covid truly landed, he went to Tokyo for an intensive month-long training course at Japan’s original sushi training school. Returning, he began preparing sushi for private parties and eventually, last April, launched TokYou Sushi.
The plan was to open a little sushi bar and retail outlet in town but … well, you know what The Covid makes of ‘plans’. The ‘public face’ of TokYou is on hold for the moment (though he supplies a lot of outlets in West Cork). So instead, we collect our tray from his production unit on Bridge Street.
Nobody masters sushi in a month, no matter how specialised or skilled the instruction. And Wojakowski humbly admits he is at the beginning of his journey — but we are all immediately wowed by the visual impact of his delicate assemblage; colours, patterns, textures. La Daughter, whose most favourite food in the world is sushi, has to be near tied down to prevent an ‘advance sampling’ of what is tonight’s main course back home.
Save opening a crisp and full Picpoul de Pinet (Domaine de Mirande), setting the table simply involves removing the lid and diving headlong into this piscine smorgasbord. Sashimi includes salmon and excellent 24-hour marinaded tuna (soy, sake, Mirin and sugar). And very tasty octopus is an edible encomium to an ingredient criminally underused on these shores. Prawns feature in several iterations, cooked and butterflied over rice encasing sashimi salmon and a very moresome tempura prawn with avocado and ikura (salmon roe, marinaded in soy). In addition, we have a vegetarian nori roll with tamagoyaki (Japanese omelette), Inari (a tofu skin) with rice and a crab and cream cheese roll.
Wojakowski may be in the initial stages of his journey but he has spent the last year alone perfecting his rice, a crucial element in the overall delivery, and this is spot on, sticky yet toothsome with savoury flavouring (sushi-su: rice wine vinegar, salt, sugar) nicely balanced.
He is equally determined to fully exploit the maritime bounty of West Cork and it is a shame we miss his efforts with a delivery of fresh halibut by just a day. A year or two from now, when Ireland is truly open for business once more, Wojakowski has all the potential to become yet another star of the West Cork food scene.
We finish with chocolate tart, baked by Kalbo’s proprietor Siobhan O’Callaghan. In fact, I could quite literally ‘finish’ with this chocolate tart as of my choices of death row desserts (you hardly think I’m sticking to just one, now, do you?). It is layered as follows:, superb short pastry; chopped roasted nuts; butter caramel sauce; dark and milk chocolate ganache. It is simple, elegant, and quite divine. A great meal, proving that it’ll take more than The Covid to stop Skibbereen laying on a fine spread!
