Viva Lewes Issue #139 April 2018

FOOD REVIEW
Lemongrass
Turning Japanese... but staying Thai
You no longer have to
go to Brighton to eat
sushi, and I’m not just
talking about Waitrose.
Lemongrass, the Thai
restaurant on School
Hill have added a
Japanese twist to their
menu, and brought
in a sushi chef, with a
couple of decades of
experience behind him.
Said chef has got
his own little space,
where you can see him making the sushi, which
is a nice bit of theatre. My wife Rowena and I
arrive at 7pm on a mild Friday evening in March.
We’re not Japanese food experts, but we’re both
Moshimo regulars, we’ve both tried making our
own sushi, and we’re interested to see if this restaurant’s
Japanese fare is going to be high-quality
enough to ensure our regular custom.
The menu gives you plenty of choice: we decide
to have a few small dishes and see if there’s room
for anything else later. And so we order a Wakame
Salad (seaweed, citrus and sesame seed, £4.50) a
portion of deep-fried soft-shell crab (£7.95) and,
most enticingly of all, a ‘Tokyo’ assortment of
hand-made sushi, including four California Rolls,
four Tempura Futo Rolls, and four Black Spider
Futo Rolls (£16.95 for all 12). I get a bottle of
Asahi, Ro sticks to water.
First up, the soft-shell crab, which comes lightly
battered and in a black pepper sauce: a delicate
hit. Then comes the seaweed, moister than we
expected. The citrus tang sets off the milder seaweed
taste, and the texture offers an interesting,
slippery crunch.
When the waiter (Ahmed, incidentally, who used
to work at Shanaz)
brings the sushi, on
a black slate, we are
silenced for a good
few seconds. They are
plump, and colourful,
and topped with caviarlike
tobiko roe (which,
I later learn, comes
from flying fish). The
rice is cooked just
right: there’s a stickiness
about it and you
can see the individual
grains. They’re big: of the two-bite, rather than
the one-bite variety. And they taste just great, full
of crab and avocado and spring onion and drizzled
with marie rose and teriyaki. I believe they are the
most exotic thing I’ve ever been served in Lewes.
We’re sated, but not finished, as greed takes over:
we order another round of dishes: exquisite gyoza
(pan-grilled dumplings, £6.95, cooked beautifully
so the bottoms are crunchy), some miso
soup (£3.90) and a bowl of unajyu (grilled eel on
steamed rice, £17.95), washed down with warm
sake (£5.95) which comes in little ceramic bottles.
Luckily a film at the Depot we’ve bought tickets
for halts the feeding frenzy: this could have gone
on all night.
We went to town, then, but you don’t need to.
The multi-course Japanese experience is a great
special occasion option, (we’ll definitely be back
soon) and a very welcome addition to Lewes’
rapidly changing restaurant scene. But it’s reassuring
to know we can still pop in for a bowl of Pad
Thai, too, at under a tenner. Or, for that matter,
some crispy prawn panang with fresh chilli & lime
leaves. Alex Leith
01273 486696
71