Please note that since writing this blog post, Soho Sushi has closed down
Several very strange things happened last night. The first was in Soho Sushi. Let me set the scene:
I’d arrived a minute or two later than my friend, and after ten minutes at our table no one had offered either of us a drink (nothing strange there, thinks the Amsterdammer). Eventually, we asked for a wine list. There wasn’t one: just red, white or rosé. Not feeling particularly confident about committing to a bottle on so little information, we asked to taste the red. Our server poured us two small glasses (so far, so good). I wasn’t convinced, so my friend decided to order a glass of the red by herself, while I opted for a cocktail. The waitress brought the glass of red wine, and proceeded to empty the contents of my friend’s tasting glass into the full glass. A little odd, admittedly, but waste-not-want-not ‘n all that. But then, she tipped the contents of my tasting glass in as well. I was speechless. Literally. I couldn’t order for another five minutes.
In the meantime, my cosmopolitan arrived. Thank god, I thought, needing a drink by this point. Only it wasn’t a drink. It was pink high-fructose corn syrup. Whatever alcohol might have been hiding in there didn’t even touch the sides.
It didn’t bode well, but we soldiered on. To start, we shared some edamame beans (by far the best thing on the menu), chicken yakitori, and salt and pepper shrimp. The yakitori marinade was generic, and the sauce more watery than sticky. The shrimp bore no evidence of any pepper, and the saltiness came mainly from the accompanying brown gloop. It had also been battered and deep-fried, but not quite for long enough, so it ate like flabby, soggy tempura.
The sushi we had next was clumsily executed, although the fish on the nigiri did at least taste fresh. One of the maki rolls contained something overly fishy and brown and salty. Sort of like fish paste but even less pleasant for being so unexpected. Also disturbingly salty was the soy sauce. You wouldn’t think you could get soy sauce wrong, but somehow they did. We paid up and got the hell out of there.
And then another very strange thing happened. I went to a sports bar. In Amsterdam. And we’re not talking about any old sports bar here. We’re talking about the Satellite – you’ve seen it, you’ve just ignored it. Trust me. It’s on the corner of the Leidseplein opposite Burger King. It has about 50 screens inside, all playing different games (I was there to watch LSU Tigers vs. Georgia Bulldogs play American football – don’t ask; it’s a long story). Beer costs about a fiver, tap water is off limits, and they serve an excessively long, overtly international menu, seemingly all night. The toilets have signs everywhere saying ‘No Drugs Allowed’ and ‘Video cameras in operation’. Everything – everything – about this place screams “don’t go inside!!!” And yet I did. And I had fun. And stranger still, at about one in the morning, after a dozen portions of baby-back ribs had wafted past my nose on their way from the kitchen to a tourist with the munchies, I ordered one myself. We all know I like pork, but from a sports bar? Whatever happened to standards? Ok, it might have had something to do with the number of over-priced Coronas I’d drunk at the time coupled with my post-Soho dissatisfaction with my sushi dinner, but I confess: they actually tasted pretty good.
