Ed eats

Wasabi Sushi Express
Vault 2
Valletta Waterfront
Floriana
Tel: 2122 7235

Food: 7/10
Service: 8/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 9/10
Overall: 8/10

I don’t do quite well in crowds. Crowds separate the strong from the weak – those who jostle and those who are jostled. I don’t have what it takes to push people around, so I get pushed around myself. Might as well wear a T-shirt that says ‘beta male’ and simply swim gradually towards my destination, trying to minimise damage by elbows and other people’s sweat as I do so.

I understand that this runs against what nature gave me. We’re meant to be gregarious and happy to be surrounded by other members of our species but there’s a limit to the number I’m content to deal with. If I can’t talk, hear what people are telling me, have little control over my location and spend too much time dodging strangers, then it’s time for me to seek more open pastures.Valletta Waterfront on the weekends is the kind of place I try to avoid. The formula that was applied to the locality is successful, so it attracts plenty of people who, unlike me, are happy to form part of society and actually enjoy the presence of others. Maybe I was meant to be a hermit and just got caught up with events like family and schooling, so I never stood a chance of heeding to my true call.

This is not the only reason I’m hesitant when I hear about a restaurant there that’s worth visiting. Opening up at Valletta Waterfront takes the determination to handle large volumes of patrons without compromising quality. The ones that succeed tend to hang around for a while and there are a couple of shining examples of this ability. Those that are inconsistent invariably flounder.

Over the weekend, I catch up with the grazing patterns of anyone who will talk to me. I separate the sources by what I know to be their preferences. There are those who favour value and others who don’t care about the money. There are those who value quantity and others who’ll willingly trade it for quality. Then there’s my favourite sister.

Being a student makes value a necessity but then she insists on having everything else on top of that. So when she recommends a place, I’m probably looking at exceptional value for a decent quantity of food at quality that is more than acceptable.

I just didn’t expect her to suggest a restaurant at the Valletta Waterfront to me. She’s seen the expression on my face when this happens.

Yet she was happy to recommend Wasabi and suggested we visit together. My compromise was picking a Monday night, banking on the season and the quietest day of the week for relative tranquillity.

It turned out to be better than expected. A lovely breeze chilled the will to leave the house out of most people, so we practically had the whole area to ourselves. Parking is finally a sensible flat fee now. This is not necessarily a novelty to most but I haven’t been there for quite a while.

Wasabi has replaced a Chinese restaurant that I’d been to and that managed to put me off food for a few hours. And they’ve replaced the entire interior, possibly scraping the ghosts of departed frying oil from the walls as they did so. The layout is a work of design genius.

There’s a conveyor belt that forms a large ‘U’ shape in the centre, with stools all along the inside. The outer edges of the conveyor have tables that jut out perpendicular to the direction of the conveyor and seat four. This gives the advantage of conveyor-belt sushi without the awkward rubbernecking to speak to all the members of the party.

The layout is a work of design genius

The second improvement to the conveyor-belt system is the availability of a fixed price. This delivers the benefit of the system without having to worry about the colour of the dish and the bill you’re likely to rack up. I was a little concerned. My sister and I both have the ability to eat ourselves into a coma. We agreed to depend on our better halves to carry us to hospital if this happened.

The man who greeted us was just great. He showed us our choice of seating arrangements, explained the system, let us know that miso soup is available all night and said we’d have drinks menus quite soon. He smiled all the time and made us feel genuinely welcome, repeating that he was available to help us with absolutely anything.

Then he pointed out a little button by our table that we could press to attract the attention of the team. It’s like the one in-flight attendants hate, only this guy seemed to be recommending that we use it at any time.

It does solve a potential logistical issue. The two halves of the conveyor belt are separated by a vertical partition to provide privacy to the tables and this could make it difficult for us to attract the attention of the service team across the restaurant without a button to press.

One of his colleagues brought the wine menu. Just like him, she was polite, verging on obsequious at times by the standards we’re used to. She held the menu in both hands and presented it to the table, as is polite in the land where sushi hails from.

Once we’d taken this all in, we realised that we were all very hungry and that we were waiting around for nothing. There were no orders to be taken. So we tackled the conveyor belt and started to pick little dishes and consume their contents. There’s a little gap in the service here.

I like to have a little bowl to pour soy sauce into and another for wasabi. Without anything of the sort I simply relegated my first dish to soy container and squeezed wasabi out of the little single-serve portions on to the side of one.

Wasabi is a bit of a conundrum. When there’s a jar of the stuff at table, it can be a little dodgy because you’re sharing this with everyone else who has sat there before you.

The single serve portions are as far removed from the real horseradish as it gets but at least you know you’re the first to tear it open. These did the trick and I must warn you that it is at the hotter end of the spectrum. Overdo it and you’ll feel a little devil try to bore a hole through your skull from the inside of your head.

The sushi itself is fine. It isn’t technical. It doesn’t include any fancy or expensive ingredients. There are those rolls I hate, the ones made with stuff like canned tuna or colourful stuff with mayonnaise on. But there’s a reasonable enough selection for me to avoid the items I don’t particularly like and simply pick the ones I do, and there is a seemingly endless supply of it.

We went through salmon rolls, salmon nigiri, California rolls, wakame salads, prawn rolls, prawn nigiri, squid nigiri and more, and they were all quite lovely. The menu goes on a little and this is where it gets unusual and interesting. The stream of sushi is occasionally interrupted by spring rolls, wontons and even lovely little dumplings that we associate with the Chinese kitchen.

There were also bowls of unreasonably tasty noodles. And as the evening progressed, little balls of fried ice cream drizzled with honey made for a sweet interlude that we initially promised ourselves would be dessert, hoping the word would lend a finality that could indicate the end of our meal.

Then more noodles turned up. Then it was prawn tempura. We agreed that we’d call the second round of ice cream dessert. The first was just a sorbet in costume.

By the time we figured we were done, there was pile of 40 little plates on our table. The cost of this unlimited bounty is of €20 per person. Adding a bottle of wine pushed our bill to €25 each. And the expression on the face of our lovely waitress when she realised that the €10 tip was not a mistake on our part was just priceless. It was a well-deserved token of our appreciation for the way we’d been made to feel totally welcome.

If the model they’ve imposed on themselves turns out to be sustainable once our national appetite descends upon this place, I think we have a definite keeper.

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