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Irish Times
03-07-2025
- Irish Times
Maneki restaurant review: A showy start gives way to a muddled menu
Maneki Address : 43 Dawson Street, Dublin 2, D02 NH42 Telephone : 01-5610889 Cuisine : Japanese Website : Cost : €€€ There's a theatrical puff of smoke after the tuna sashimi lands – four coral slabs lined up in a wooden bowl (€12), flanked by a curl of carrot and a chunk of ginger. Mist billows across the table the second water hits the flask of dry ice. It is a perfect Instagram moment. The tuna doesn't need the drama. It's firm, without sinew and cut cleanly into thick slices. The restaurant is Maneki. It opened in 2019 in a Georgian town house on Dawson Street – a five-storey building now home to four diningrooms and four private karaoke suites at the top of the house. We're two floors up, in a room with banquettes, textured grey stone walls and four oversized white feathers. A slatted wooden divider gives a polite nod to Japan. Owner Polly Yang trained in Japanese kitchens before launching a menu pitched as a 'culinary dialogue' between Chinese, Japanese, and European techniques. In practice, this means sashimi and futomaki on the same page as stir-fries, hot pots, and party platters of wok-fried crustaceans in Cajun or curry sauce. The aim is comfort, not challenge. The Tripadvisor reviews are heavy on hen parties. I had received an email about their new 'Holy Crab Seafood Heaven', which includes crab, crayfish, prawns, octopus, squid, clams and mussels stir-fried in garlic butter chilli sauce on The Holy Special (€89 for two), with the addition of lobster on The Holy Supreme (€114). READ MORE [ Hub Himalayan takeaway review: Deep Nepalese flavour with no shortcuts Opens in new window ] Holy Crab Supreme: lobster, swimming crab, crayfish, prawn, octupus, squid, clams, mussel fish cake, corn, potato, broccoli, rice cake and sausage. Photograph: Alan Betson As entry to heaven is a bit on the steep side, I keep it to a step further down the stairway and opt for the soft shell crab roll (€26), a tidy eight-piece roll with enough crunch to register, chunks of avocado inside and bonito flakes twitching on top. It's dressed in a sticky soy glaze. You'd have it again. You'd also forget it immediately. Chicken gyoza (five pieces, €11) follow – steamed, then pan-fried, served on a narrow plate with a slick of dipping sauce. The filling is loose but warm, the bottom crisp and the top gently steamed. It's fine. The beef teppan yaki (€30) arrives on a teppan plate, spitting and seething like it's been fired directly from a kiln. The 8oz striploin is sliced, sitting on top of white cabbage and bean sprouts, with sides of rice and miso soup. It is rare (as requested), but the lightly browned exterior indicates that it has been seared on a flat top that wasn't hot enough, or there was moisture on the surface of the meat. It's missing that outside char. But the real issue is with the teriyaki sauce. It is a cooking sauce – applied to glaze the meat as it sears on the grill. Here it is brought in a jug, to be poured over the steak at the table. Nothing caramelises. It ends up tasting more like syrup than soy. Then there's the kimchi seafood ramen (€24), served in a deep bowl where an excess of farmed salmon threatens to derail the entire thing until it is removed to a side plate. The rest of it is pretty standard fare, a boiled egg sliced into halves, soft noodles, tofu, bok choi, scallions, squid, a prawn, and two fake crab sticks. The broth is bland. There's a trace of kimchi, but no funk, no spice, no acid. You could call it one note if you could identify the note. Maneki on Dawson Street. Photograph: Alan Betson Interior. Photograph: Alan Betson Karaoke at Maneki. Photograph: Alan Betson A 210ml carafe of Junmai sake (€12) is served warm – light, clean, slightly floral – and we also have a chilled bottle of Asahi (€6.50). The drinks list covers the bases – wine by the glass and bottle, sake in carafes, beers, plum wine, and a short run of spirits. Enough to work with, though not a list for lingering over. We share mochi for dessert (€7.50) – neat frozen balls of ice cream (green tea and mango) wrapped in a sticky rice casing. It's quite firm, out of the freezer, cold, chewy and not particularly remarkable. Maneki is built for groups – the kind of place where a big table, a bit of sake, and a blast of dry ice can carry the night. Service is warm, but the food coasts on surface-level polish. What's promised as layered, pan-Asian cooking lands as bland mediocrity. Prices aim high, but the cooking rarely does. There's no disaster – just a lot of theatre up front, and not much that stays with you after the smoke clears. Dinner for two with a flask of sake and a beer, including 12.5 per cent service charge, was €145.13. The verdict A showy start gives way to a muddled menu and inconsistent execution. Food provenance Scottish salmon; Sri Lankan tuna; Indian and South American prawns; Irish lobster, crab from Ireland, Greece and Spain; meats from Ireland – chicken and pork not free-range. Vegetarian options Sweet potato tempura sushi roll, vegan oden Japanese hot pot, yasai yaki soba, vegan chocolate and coconut tart. Wheelchair access No accessible room or toilet. Music Muted, in the background.
Telegraph
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
William Sitwell reviews Pip, Manchester: ‘One's eyebrows are raised at the portion control'
This week's review was supposed to be about Kaji, a place that's all big screens, loud tunes and tall flames. Or, as they put it themselves, where 'the thrill of fire-driven cooking meets the pulse of high-energy music'. It's a Japanese restaurant, whose stoves – behind the long, central bar – are manned by a collection of burly lads. It's all tummies, bald heads, tattoos and heat. And while the service and the sashimi are good – excellent fish, some of it cured, and with perfect body-temperature sushi rice – the place is afflicted by some overbearing cooking that cheapens the noble name of Japanese cuisine: a pair of nori seaweed crackers come as balls filled with sickly sweet kimchi ketchup in a vulgar fist-fight with some creamy cod's roe. Some fried oysters (always a terrible concept) drown in a dump of mayo and hot bonito sauce, and lamb chops fail the tender test and are properly wrecked sitting on a vulgar pond of sticky 'tomato ponzu'. No beast should die to have that stuff squirted anywhere near it. And Kaji is a Japanese gaff without sake. Which is like opening a British pub in Tokyo and forgetting to put an ale on tap. All of which brash (and pricey) torture makes Pip such a great-value tonic. This latest addition to the city's generally fabulous dining scene is in the new Treehouse hotel in the city centre. It takes up the whole of the lobby, and a wonderful thing that is too, being a charmingly colourful and comfortable space. The place is clad in wood, ropes and greenery – the veritable treehouse – and the chef is Mary-Ellen McTague, an earthy character, a sort of Alice Waters of modern-day Manchester. Her menu distils elements of local food culture, bringing them to the table – via great charm by the way, as the staff are a dream – with considerable finesse. Although such is the level of refinement that one's eyebrows are raised at the portion control. I was worried my Lancashire hot pot would leave me struggling to rise from my chair, imagining a vast scoop from a large casserole, a steaming mass of potato slices atop a hearty stew. But instead came a dainty oval pot of braised shoulder with a small spoon of cabbage and an oyster shell filled with salty sauce. It was fabulously good though, an elegant version of this classic dish. And there was similar Borrowers -style hilarity with our starter of British charcuterie. The waiter had even hinted at its vastness, to such an extent that I said I'd have it anyway and then perhaps they could box the remains of this charnel house of cured meats. Instead came three slices of bresaola and two of coppa. We swallowed them merrily, with the crunch of melba toast, quicker than you can say 'smörgåsbord, what smörgåsbord?' But, as with the main course, the flavour was perfect. We had snacked on naughty little treats of smoked nuts and cheese gougères and, that meat plate aside, a starter of creamy wild garlic soup, with little bits of spongy goat's cheese bobbing around. It was a gorgeous thing, deft and velvety, capturing the flavours of spring. My pal Flora had a chicken dish; tender slices of crisp-skinned breast with a little open pie of leg meat. Enough for her, but I would have asked for both legs and the rest of the bird. Pud was a shared apple trifle, a gift from heaven in spoonfuls of custard, soft sponge and apple that made me want to issue a diktat that all future trifles must be like this: ditch the sherry and pour on the calvados. Bravo, Pip. Pip pip!
