Credit where credit’s due: the boxes at this new takeaway sushi spot at The Bower development in Old Street really are great. I’m not usually that taken by packaging but here I found myself poring over these sleek, robust and roomy packs. So too did a vegetable miso soup, thick with salty, earthy flavour and bobbing with bouncy shiitake mushrooms. But the sushi itself? A disappointment.
To be honest, none of it looked that appetising lined up in rows behind Perspex. Some of the rice on the maki was lifeless and dry, looking far from freshly prepared. The nigiri seemed perkier but was sloppily put together, some of the fish slinking off as if keen to escape. I sampled a few nigiri (salmon, seared salmon on black rice and eel in a sickly sweet sauce) and some maki (soy roast beef, crayfish and spicy tuna). None of it came anywhere close to wowing.
The influx of restaurants and bars at The Bower is presumably geared at keeping Silicon Roundabout workers well fed as they beaver away earning their bitcoins. I’d be amazed if they spent many of them at Maki.