Cafe Sakura
Sliema

Food: 5/10
Service: 7/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 6/10
Overall: 6/10

What a sad plate of sushi this was. Tired and haggard-looking. Lacking colour. This sorry sushi extended its hand by way of a cheerless, lukewarm welcome to Sliema’s Sakura.

Exceptional sushi is a coming together of excellent ingredients, timing and technique. The result is sushi that is mind-blowingly fantastic and indescribably sublime. Ethereal, in fact. In this respect, Sakura is hardly scaling the heights. There are some glaringly big issues here. The principal attribute of good sushi is the quality and the freshness of the ingredients. It is the beginning of everything and will make or break a sushi restaurant. Sakura’s fish is not premium quality fish, neither is it the freshest. This is not to say that the sushi we tasted was gross or wholly inedible. It just wasn’t good.

The second attribute is the manner in which the sushi is prepared, how it is assembled and served. Timing is fundamental. Sakura’s sushi had clearly been sitting and was nowhere close to having been freshly prepared. Even the rice was bad. Having been sitting in a refrigerator for far too long, the texture of the lightly-vinegared rice was gummy and unpleasant. It was horribly cold and claggy when good sushi rice should be moist and just about warm. Each mouthful turned into a laborious undertaking to fight the tedious texture of the rice. Having been prepared ahead, the nori encasing the ingredients in the sushi rolls had also suffered. It was limp and sodden and stuck in my throat like a gelatinous ball. The intriguing textural aspect that this dried seaweed brings, that delightful toasty, crackly crispiness was sorely missing in the sushi.

Finally, Sakura’s sushi technique was lacking in many ways. This was sloppy, shoddily-made sushi that hadn’t even been properly rolled. Individual pieces struggled to hold their shape and their contents fell out untidily. The nori in the sushi rolls flapped about loosely. With the nigiri, the rice had been pressed too hard and packed too tightly.

The tempura shrimp roll, comprising of shrimp tempura and avocado, should have been delightful. Instead, it was soggy and smothered in a thick yoghurt mayonnaise. Even worse was the crab roll. I felt pain at the mere sight of it. Composed primarily of crab sticks, processed seafood shaped to resemble crab leg meat, it was never going to be a favourite of mine.

But this particular, non-traditional version took the biscuit. The roll came heaped with a mixture of minced crab meat and pineapple, whipped together with a honey and mustard mayonnaise sauce. Eew.

Although we had fared better with the cooked dishes, we couldn’t get past the disappointment of the sushi and the sashimi

This sickly sweet, westernised abomination would just about have been happy sitting between two slices of bread in a cheap, pre-packaged supermarket sandwich. Here, adorning my sushi roll, futilely embellishing it, it was intolerable. We were coming close to sushi sacrilege.

Good sushi is only preoccupied with exalting the clean, fresh flavours of the main ingredients. I detest a garnish that makes itself the focal point of the sushi. The focus should remain solely on the fish and on the rice.

The salmon and avocado roll, too, was topped with an unappealingly gloopy wasabi mayonnaise. Indeed, a quick look at the menu soon revealed that most of the sushi rolls seemed to have a garnish of mayo-heavy sauces from chilli mayonnaise to horseradish mayo and sweet chilli mayo – all desperate attempts to bring something contemporary to the archetypal Japanese repertoire. They failed miserably.

There is a skill and an art to sushi, and nigiri sushi is no exception, being raw fish lain over a pressed pillow of vinegared rice, gently formed by hand. A skilled sushi chef will ensure that the skin of a deftly sliced piece of fish is scored in a specific way so as to best drape the mound of rice, and in order to display the skin in the finest, most appetising manner.

Here, very sadly, the fish looked like it had been killed anew.  Sakura’s prawn nigiri was not fresh. The prawn’s appearance was colourless and grey. Wilting, it clung to the rice miserably. It was the same with the sweet shrimp; its  subtle sweetness and vibrancy entirely sapped out of it. We drank our hot green tea, always served at sushi restaurants in Japan and the world over. It was refreshing to sip between bites. There were a lot of cloying flavours to wash out.

Sakura’s lack of exacting standards continued with the sashimi. Outstanding sashimi has a melt-in-the-mouth quality to it. It practically disintegrates on the tongue. Presented on a bed of shredded radish, Sakura’s sashimi didn’t glisten gorgeously, it was just wet.  Far from being beautifully marbled, the salmon sashimi was extremely fatty and chewy. And the thick, clumsily hacked slices of tuna were too dark; a clear sign that the fish hadn’t been freshly cut.

In stark contrast to the sushi, the duck teriyaki was actually quite lovely. We were invited to pour a small side bowl of deliciously sticky teriyaki sauce over the tender, nicely cooked duck breast. The sauce was full of warmth and flavour and beautifully complemented the rich gaminess of the duck. For the Chilli Ebi, a bundle of king prawns, certainly not the freshest, had been fried in a spicy chilli sauce before being  served alongside steaming rice and a tangle of leaves; a chive salad garnished with an aromatically nutty sesame oil dressing. It was mediocre. The happy side of mediocre.

Although we had fared better with the cooked dishes, we couldn’t get past the disappointment of the sushi and the sashimi; the poor quality of the ingredients and their lacklustre preparation. Sakura’s offerings had tasted very much like supermarket sushi.

This is not a fine dining Japanese restaurant and so I was under no illusion that I would be eating spectacular sushi and sashimi. Nevertheless, the latter were unacceptably second-rate and entirely underwhelming.

Japanese cuisine is a ritual in itself and the epitome of food perfection – a culmination of fresh ingredients, precision and exquisite attention to detail.

And if God, so they say, is in the details, then I’m afraid he won’t be found at Sakura.